PropertyOfZack is stoked to be hosting Edelweiss’s Track-By-Track for their new release as well as a free download of two of their songs called “(No)” and “Icarus.” Tommy Vitale was kind enough to go in-depth to explain the meaning behind each of the songs on the album, so check it out and download the free songs!

(No) - This song is our town, Stroudsburg. When we first started making music and playing shows, kids around here hated it and treated us like shlock. Our hometown was never known for indie music before us and those kids that were the hierarchy of the scene around here showed their hatred. But now that we’ve been doing this for a little over a year, those kids that talked shlock on us have ended up understanding our music, our apparel, and the way we act around them. Like fucking controlled citizens… It’s all come full circle finally.

Fiasco - This song was actually titled ‘Complete Atmosphere” before we went into the studio because our initial inspiration for the tune was the thought of global warming and ongoing horrible in the world. But as we got farther along in the writing process and finally brought it Jeremy Sklarsky(our producer), the song had evolved into just a melody and a beat and had transcended our original thoughts to it. Now, the song doesn’t really have a specific meaning outside of the music itself. Just a bunch of little sentences and repeated words of Fiasco.

Sound of Pennsylvania - Going into writing this song, it had probably ten different songs in one. We cut out all of it and started from step one. Writing process was a longer one. In the beginning, it actually had lyrics and later on when we had the whole instrumental laid out, we took them out. There was just too much going on with the instruments to put in vocals, as the instruments could interpret vocals. In our minds, we see this song showing the different seasons in a tune. Going through a whole year’s worth of weather. 

Witches and Vampires - I wrote this song at my house starting with the bass part of the chorus. Leading into the verse, I wrote the guitar parts and just programmed garage band drums to keep a fast upbeat pace. As I wrote the instrumental, I just overlaid nonsense lyrics at the time thinking we could use them as fillers just to show the rest of the band. I brought it to them and we tried to change the lyrics into an actual meaning, but nothing really came of it. The lyrics we had down just seemed very catchy and different. The title that I came up with for the song was influenced by the title of “Hunting for Witches” by Bloc Party. Took witches from that and added Vampires to the end. We thought the song would be even more nonsense if we didn’t have the title in the song. In conclusion, we took the title and squeezed it into the last words of the song. Witches and Vampires has no meaning whatsoever, just more of rambling words used as another instrument.

Icarus - The last of the EP to record… Going into the studio, this song was not even fully complete. We had some instrumental parts we weren’t too sure of. In the writing process, we started writing it off as a song about Russia for our friend Ildar. Later on, the part we wrote about Russia didn’t fit any other part of the song and was later removed from this project. We then moved onto just focusing on writing the instrumental first, rather than vocals and instruments at once. We came up with writing about the delinquents in our town. The failures, the low-lifes,and the clemin. Just kids that are up to no good. Our peers that were not too fond of us and the kids who liked to care about nothing. As we went into the studio the lyrics were all finished, but still instrumentally we were not. Just took one little part to finish up Icarus with our producer and made it our most successful single.