Eyelash
Not content to sit behind her spectacles in a cozy uptown office, Pascale Jean-Louis takes her psychotherapy to the stage where she advises from experience. With a voice at once slippery and severe, the Eyelash frontwoman is not afraid to dredge up or rehash the unpleasantries of life. The band’s latest EP, The Uses of Disorder, establishes Jean-Louis as the voice of a collective urban unconscious: downtrodden, spat upon, cracked up and aching for more.
A native New Yorker, Pascale describes her city as “a lost place,” painfully aware of what it once was, like a business exec in mid-life crisis. In her song “Ambition To Go,” Jean-Louis follows on the heels of those who will do anything to live in “the idea of New York.” And the theme of self-delusion is carried through into tunes like the whisper-to-yell “Indie Boy” in which Jean-Louis laments her having fallen for a member of that famously impenetrable subgroup. “Why don’t you save yourself?” comes as the anthemic cry of “City of God,” and could be the coda to Eyelash’s modus operandi.
Eyelash was formed in 2003 and is the culmination of each member’s chops hard-won by time served in previous bands. With Anthony Bax snarling on drums and Chris Juliani’s buzz-saw guitars, Pascale Jean-Louis ensnares the listener with hypnotic vocals reminiscent of Chrissy Hynde matched with the gaul of Courtney Love. The Village Voice says that “Pascale plays with conviction in an effort to create a new template for female musicians,” and Women of MP3.com calls Eyelash “the perfect blend of punk, pop and hard rock.”
Raised in a strict, Catholic family, Jean-Louis tends toward iconoclasm in her own writing. Jean-Louis cites among her major influences Hieronymous Bosch’s haunting landscapes and Victorian-era author Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s story of a woman descending into madness within the confines of the yellow wallpaper. Apparent in her lyrics are the remnants of religious symbolism, but twisted and stretched for her own devices. At the mic, she holds the captivating stare of a saint in duress, but is likely to leap out of the painting when necessary.
As a performer, Jean-Louis is trying to set a new standard for women in the throes of rockdom. Still, with her raw and smarting lyrics, she is willing to show herself entirely to her audience, withholding nothing. This unique merging of undeniable command and molten vulnerability distinguishes Eyelash as the quintessential band for an injured generation, struggling to define itself. Virtuosic, tight-fitting and dripping down your sleeve.