Eskimeaux

When I was 24 years old I started going to church, attending a different one every week. I had been raised in the fundamentalist tradition, and being in a period of transition, the Christian rituals and rites were a source of familiarity that comforted me and implicitly assured that everything was going to be all right. 

The churches I visited were in the progressive and decaying parts of the city, where Wal-Mart doesn’t even bother trying, where buildings rise to majestic heights and people with children don’t live because the property taxes are too high and the schools not great enough. 

And while the sermons were somber and serious, intellectual and rigorous, containing novel insights into the human condition against a liberal underpinning, the churches themselves were too big for the congregations, which often numbered in the teens. The people had moved on but the buildings themselves were rooted in one geographical place, and so those that remained sang the soaring choruses and played the majestic organ against their own waning echoes.

Eskimeaux reminds me of those grand empty churches. She is desolate and haunting; her voice possesses a high classical bearing that isn’t afraid to scale the heavens. But all is not well. There is an undercurrent of loss that flows throughout, hints of unspeakable trauma, of shifting self, of fleeting love. It’s all heavy stuff, but what strikes me the most listening to this is how, well, striking it is how much her voice fills the sanctum in spite of it all. Self-conscious indie hiding behind layers of sound this is not. 

Her eponymous album Eskimeaux is a reworking and redefining of many earlier releases, which can be found on bandcamp.com and the Edible Onion record label. While retaining many high classical elements, it also introduces warm guitar and scatterings of dirty electronics, stuttering percussion and isolated blips. These elements act as modernity intruding upon the tabernacle, a jarring effect that contrasts against her choral motets, one that harkens to a past when the center held while the present crumbles before you. If you need a reference point, think the atmospherics of Sigur Ros against the glorious ennui of Cat Power, but I say that what Eskimeaux does here and might do in the future surpasses those reference points and lurches forward to a world where it may never be resolved and that’s okay.