To celebrate 21 years since the formation of Eskimo Joe, the platinum-selling band from Western Australia are reissuing their back catalogue in special new formats.
After kicking off the reissue series in March with their 2001 debut album Girl and with 2011’s Ghosts Of The Past given the deluxe treatment in May, the next Eskimo Joe album to be reissued will be 2009’s Inshalla. The album, which debuted at #1 on the ARIA Albums Chart and reached gold album sales, will be released on Friday August 17 and is available to pre-order here.
As well as being issued on limited edition orange vinyl, the Inshalla anniversary edition CD will feature the original album paired with eight additional songs. Bonus material on the CD includes a previously unreleased demo of the ARIA top 20 single "Foreign Land", B-sides and the track "Thunderclap", which featured on 2009’s hit The Twilight Saga: New Moon soundtrack alongside songs by The Killers, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Death Cab For Cutie.
Eskimo Joe’s fourth album, Inshalla arrived in 2009 in the wake of the massive success of 2006’s multi-platinum success Black Fingernails Red Wine. Inshalla found Eskimo Joe drawing influence from their global travels – from Egyptian marketplaces through to vibrant New York boroughs.
“So much of the music and stories we had written in Eskimo Joe in the past had been about living in Fremantle and looking out at the world,” Eskimo Joe frontman Kav Temperley says. “This time, instead of stories about life in Fremantle, our stories were now written sitting in El Fishawy Cafe in the old marketplace in Cairo, or walking around Soho in New York; places where we were always strangers.”
After self-producing Black Fingernails Red Wine, Inshalla was produced by celebrated US producer Gil Norton (Pixies, Foo Fighters, The Triffids) in Byron Bay, New South Wales.
“It was there, amongst the huge tropical bugs and golf ball-sized hailstones, the album took shape,” Kav recalls. “We found ourselves pushing harder in the studio, trying to come up with new sounds and song structures. We had grown up on bands like Pixies, and on albums like The Color And The Shape by Foo Fighters, and Gil Norton is credited with inventing the quiet/loud verse/chorus that became the blueprint of Nirvana's sound. It was a buzz to work with one of our heroes and hear all his fantastic stories.”
As for the album title, Temperley loved the way the Arabic term rolled off the tongue.
“The word Inshalla means ‘God willing’ or ‘What will be, will be’,” Kav says. “I can’t think of a more perfect word to represent this period of our lives. Inshalla - what a blessing it was indeed.”
Globally, Eskimo Joe have sold in excess of 700,000 albums. Over the next six months, Eskimo Joe albums A Song Is A City (2004) and Black Fingernails, Red Wine (2006) will also be reissued on coloured vinyl and as anniversary edition CD packages. For upcoming Eskimo Joe tour dates, please visit their official website.
