 Only a couple times a year a does truly great record come around. This
time it comes from The Escape Engine, with thier heavily hyped debut
album, Celebity Role Model.
Gaining the attention of local audiences, including newly founded indie
label Fidelity Records, The Escape Engine is known for putting on one of
the most insane live shows in the emo world these days. The crowd is just
so transfixed when singer, Dom Lettera, who prefers to use his mic cable
as a noose, hangs himself upside down and dangles from a lighting rig.
They can't help but to stare while the band is between songs,
spontaneously improvising an electronica breakdown. The bottom line is,
when The Escape Engine takes the stage, kids suddenly are too preoccupied
to notice what the person next to them is wearing. The name of the game
for this band is INTENSITY.
Their full length album, Celebrity Role Model, translates this intensity
onto disc form. The band intentionally lived in extreme conditions in
order to create a record of the highest emotional value. Produced,
engineered, and mixed by Jesse Cannon [A Static Lullaby, Hot Rod Circuit,
Northstar, Choking Victim , Senses Fail, The Misfits ] in his NJ studio,
the band slaved away for a month, with the intent that extreme living will
create extreme music. Just as At The Drive In exponentially increased what
the MC5 created in cathartic aggression through music, The Escape Engine
now ups the ante. They have taken the aggressive pop cues from bands like
The Used and Finch and blended it with the song writing sophistication of
Cursive and The Cure, all to create what the kids in the online chat rooms
are already saying is going to be bigger than Taking Back Sunday.
The fact is, many bands do not live up to the EMO in EMOtional. Celebrity
Role Model is an unrelenting assault of screams that fucking mean
something. That something is not screaming because the kid on MTV's band
does or because it gets the girl with glasses to come in the van with you.
That something is because you can't do anything but scream with these
thoughts in your head. When you hear words like "It's a heartbeat and it's
all I have" in the single " This Jagged Alibi " you can feel the
desperation in these kids’hearts. This isn't art derived from boredom or
to serve some introverted, insecure, personality disorder to be cool in
front of the kids who laughed at you in high school……this is art made out
of the necessity to release such intense emotions from your system.
The 12 songs on this LP teeter in many different musical voices. Where
many bands musical palates are about as diverse as Bob Ross painting a
happy little forest of black and green, The Escape Engine pull in a
spectrum that is far and wide. The opening intro and the closing song "In
This Serenade" both experiment with an Artsy voice over a skit set to IDM
(Intelligent Dance Music) background music. Songs like “ The Curse” and
“The 6 Month Accident,” have pop hooks that make the kids go crazy. The
band have more mellow emotions, for the kids who like their emo more
Promise Ring and Saves The Day flavored. Songs like "Joining The Club "
and the title track embark on that familiar territory, while keeping the
soup hot. When one takes in "Celebrity Role Model " as a whole it becomes
apparent that you can not absorb this band’s sound into your system with
just one song. There is something for everyone on this disc, but most
importantly, it is rare when a band is doing something special these
days. You want to be a part of this!
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