Essenza
Devil's Breath

Excuse me while I'll just improve the searchability of this particular album review. ssenza, Essenza, Essenza, Essenza, Essenza, Essenza. Devil's breath, Devil's Breath, Devil's Breath, Devil's Breath. Essenza Devil's Breath. There! Not that I think there will be huge searches for reviews on this album anyway and the reason for that is that when I did research on this album I realised that it was actually released in 2009 and have songs from as far back as 2007 on the album 'Dance Of Liars'.

So, an album up to five years old this album is finally released late 2011 by Red Cat Promotion outside Italy where the album was released through Bigmud Records. Unfortunately I can't say I feel too fortune by the opportunity to buy this album. I'll tell you right away what I think of this album: I don't like it! At all! I think it's amateurish, unharmonical, unmelodic and unmusical. And more so than most bands albums I've reviewed.

The guitars are slow and kind of stumble forward almost like a new bred roe deer (commonly known as Bambi). The bass… I don't know what that goes on about. The drums are no better, they have a sound similar to the one coming from pounding on a table with flat open palms. The biggest issues though does not come from any of the instrumental performance but the vocals. That terrible, horrible vocals by some guy that neither knows how to sing or how to pronounce English. I haven't heard broken English like this ever, ever, ever… on an album. Not even by Rhapsody Of Fire and their speakers before they hired Christopher Lee as spoken word voice.

When I hear Essenza I think of another band I reviewed about a year ago, called vinder (read the review here). It sounds cheap, unstructured and unfinished. Like a demo recording from a garage with the cheapest equipment possible to find and then edited together in a free Windows audio program (if there is such a program?) or perhaps Garageband by a person that just don't know how to operate that program at all. In other words, it sounds… terrible!

However, I don't think the music and song writing is where this album goes mostly wrong. To me the biggest problem with this album, besides the horrific vocals, is the equipment on which it has been recorded as well as it just don't feel finished. The vocalist almost stutter his song forward one word at the time and the music just isn't good enough to compensate for this performance because it's just one guitar, one bass and the tiniest of drum-sets played one time and then mixed together. No retakes, no duplicated instrumental or vocal performances and no guesting artists or an ensemble with strings or something. This is seriously the absolutely least thing you can demand from music without removing the "music" epithet from them. And the absolutely least you can demand from a band without robbing them from being a working music group as they have one guitar, one bass, one drum and one voice backed by a second voice in choruses. When anyone does the absolutely least you can demand the result always ends the same - completely uninteresting!

Just as I said about Vinders 'Vertigo', I just find this album being too little of an effort for reaching the approved grades. They've done the least you can demand from them, settled with that, thought they still were good enough to deserve an release and then done just that. But I'm sorry Essenza, this just isn't good enough! This is well below a decent level!