Jasta
s/t

The line between heaven and hell is as thin as hair sometimes. One person can with the same effort make you both the happiest and the saddest person in the world. A place can both be the most comfortable as the most boring in the world. And the same band can give you both fantastic songs and indescribable pieces of shit. ‘Jasta’ is the first album by the well-known hardcore profile Jamey Jasta coming from his own band, known as Jasta. Here we’re offered both genius and fantastic songs as well as a big dose of pure shit. Alongside Mr Jasta we can find Nick and Charlie Bellmore as well as a number of guests and together they’ve completed twelve very hard and hardcore smelling songs with powerful melodies. Sometimes.

Jasta is not only one thing, they are plenty and a big amount of the time there’s hordes of hardcore thundering through like cattle. Then there’s times when they turn this in to a smooth and melodic chorus with clean vocals and nice rhythm. When they do what is completely random and often comes where you least expect it (so you could almost expect it to come when you’ve made yourself the most comfortable with one sound and don’t expect it to change). No warnings, just transitions – transformations – the illusion is complete when the music goes from being hard and heavy, repetitive and thundering the guitars and bass without any kind of melodic thought to play out melodies and giving us “real” music. One second to the next, no certainty that it comes in a new song and stays that way because one second to the next it might be something completely different. The vocals are working by the same pattern. In one moment Mr Jasta sings clear and clean and in the next it sounds like he’s interpreting an idiot with a mongo-voice – like “Uuuuuuuuuuh OOoooooh Buuuuaaababababaaa AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”. No sense at all.

And here we are, hands tied behind the back and a knife against the throat – threaten by the über aggressive DAMP child Jamey and his gang when he suddently throws the knife away and change it into a water pistol, puts on a to-to and start dancing ballet as we’re handed the big gun with water so our water battle goes by unfair measurement. We’re jumping over the grass sprinkler naked until Jamey pushes a button and the sprinkler starts to sprinkle sulfonic acid for a couple of minutes, corroding the limbs of everyone – blood is everywhere… and then he turns again and starts to fart rainbows while the sprinkler is playing My Little Pony. That’s how it goes. Good-bad-good-bad-bad-good-bad-bad-bad (again)-good. And vice versa. I think they sound really retarded as they go all in on the hardcore parts and most of the other parts are just great! Everything do a 180 degree turn there – real melodies, real vocals, real guitars… As in the hardcore parts it’s just two seconds of melody that’s repeated endless, just thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing and thrashing until they themselves realize they need a melodic intermission… and then go back to thrashing.

Normally this kind of mixture between aggressive and melodic is something that I love but there are billions of bands that does it and does it well. And when Jasta succeed to get it right it sounds seriously good. The problem is that they doesn't do that all the time, and when they doesn't it sounds seriously shit. In my opinion, a professional musician would have noticed these shortcomings and then done something about them - like removing them from the album before it was printed and handed out. Perhaps even written and recorded a few new songs that could have replaced these. Considering this, the question wether Jasta and his mates really are that great of musicians is something you really should ask yourself. Now, I'm not complaining or anything but in my world you either do something or you don't do it and you don't do a million things at the same time with the same thing. You can't be too schizophrenic in your songs - if you do it all the time I guess it's fine but choosing one path so clearly and then just jump to another and shifting back and forth throughout the album and individual songs just feels a tad unprofessional. Changing to each song - fine. Changing inside each song - not fine. Not unless the changes come all the time, which they don't. They come in random here and there, shifting around throughout the entire album. What once was returns, but it's what come in between that breaks it. I feel it's unprofessional to do this. One song and one new sound - fine. One song hundred sounds - sure, if it's done well. But to do this and do parts of the songs that are music (good music, actually) and other parts that are noises of retards and then mix the two around and round and round… why are they doing that? Probably because they aren't just that good of musicians after all.

So here we are - twelve songs and 37 minutes after the album started with a head that doesn't know if it should ache or shake along with the music. Four or five songs on this album is really good, but the rest mix good and bad so much it gets really frustrating. You just can't listen to them, if you like hardcore you'll vomit froth from the über melodic parts they throw in now and then and if you like melodic metal you'll be ready to run since it sounds like they play the soundtrack of "The return of the living dead freaks 3,8". This means we got about 15-20 minutes of music that is worth hearing regardless of which side you're on and about the same with unbearable music. So this makes me ask the question - is it worth paying a full album price to get the entire album when there aren't more material worth it than an EP? No, it isn't. So what are you suppose to do? Go to a computer, open an Internet browser and visit www.emusic.com and then download the songs Mourn The Illusion, Nothing They Say, Something You Should Know and The Fearless Must Endure (and if you really, really love them perhaps Set You Adrift as well) because then you get much cheaper away from it and gets everything worth your money. And if you're new at the site, you even get 25 songs for free so you actually save money literally.

To shortly summarize the Jasta debut album it is way to schizophrenic for its own good. At least according to me. It could vary itself this much without a problem, just not this way but split it over separate tracks or something. At least I would have liked that better.

HHHHHHH