Aster Tracks

I bet you thought we were done with Best Of month! Well we were, but then my partner and I got to thinking; we watch a good amount of seasonal anime a year and a lot of the times the opening songs are pretty forgettable, but sometimes they’re hits. A lot of people make anime and video game soundtracks their primary source of listening and I wish to present you the top fifty among every single show that aired this year, with a bit more of an in depth look at the top ten. We didn’t know all these shows but now we know their incredible soundtracks. #10: SK8 The Infinity (“Paradise” by Rude- α) “Paradise” gets you moving before you’re even moving. It has a lot of energy and pulls from quite a few musical influences. There’s a jazz sensibility, there’s some hip hop vocal stylings and a huge pop punk chorus. All these genres and the DIY spaces they usually find their homes in are synonymous with skateboarding culture so it makes sense they’d find their way to this series. #9: Cells at Work! ...

Something I don’t always find ways to talk about is the Providence music scene and I’ll be honest, COVID putting me indoors most of the time these days has made me fall pretty behind. Lately, however, it feels like more bands come here, than come out of here, but we are a city in the smallest state. There has been a bit of a revival in Rhode Island with promoters like The Hammer Collective working so closely with venues like Alchemy right in the heart of the city. When I was a teen though and coming up in this scene I remember venues like Lupo’s, The Living Room and Club Hell, as well as the bands that played in them. Of course we had the big names come tour through here but bands like Scare Don’t Fear, Absence of Despair and Shadow of a Doubt were titans as much as they were just members of the community. I implore you to look into those bands, all of which ( except AoD ) have long since broken up now, but one band in particular that I feel was very lost to time was A Faylene Sky. Lik...

  Misadventures is the fourth record by San Diego post-hardcore band Pierce the Veil, it’s also widely looked at as their worst ever. Collide with the Sky as well as a lot of their back catalogue of singles get a ton of love with most of the scene being split on whether “King for a Day” is the greatest song ever composed or the worst thing to ever happen to us. With the return of this band seeming likely to be this year, I wanted to come out and say it; this is the band’s best material by a mile. It was the first I was aware of Vic Fuentes’ arguis songwriting process. Locking himself in the studio to really get tracks down pat, leaving several years between albums at a time. Fuentes has talked at lengths about honing in his musicianship and being inspired by the events of the world outside his bubble on this one especially and I wanted to explore it’s many upsides to present them to you. The record comes in strong with “Dive In” an opener that takes a simple riff and slowly builds ...

In 2005 after his groundbreaking emo band Midtown broke up, Gabe Saporta traveled to the Arizona desert to find himself and contemplate what he would do with his life next. While on this trip he had a vision of what his next band would be. That band was New Jersey Fueled by Ramen/Decaydance signees Cobra Starship. We aren’t here to talk about the history of that band though, just one moment in time in particular; 2009’s Hot Mess. This was the band’s third full length and is being reissued with two additional tracks in the coming year. Why are we talking about this in early 2022? When this album came out I was a huge fan of this band’s first two records and Saporta promised this one to be their best yet with a huge focus on dance-ability. When it dropped though, I found myself disappointed. A long time has passed since 2009 though and I thought now would be the perfect time to take a visit to the past and see if I still take issue with it today. Those new songs were released in the form...

  In my 2020 album of the year list there was a very special record at my number two slot that I wanted to take a bit more time to celebrate because, frankly, I was wrong about its placement. No disrespect to Stand Atlantic, who put out Pink Elephant that year at all of course, and maybe I should clarify that side of the story first. In 2019 I discovered StAt through a Modern Baseball cover and dove into their debut record, casually at first, but soon became a nonstop listen. When COVID hit, the band started dropping a track a month stating that a real album cycle didn’t feel realistic in the climate of things. Eventually, the pandemic was consuming too much time and the record had to come out. The night I listened to it, at midnight, for the first time my jaw dropped. I declared this a ten-on-ten and my new album of the year after having another one locked in since February. I think, ultimately, I was coming off the high of watching them at a festival, meeting Bonnie Fraser and ...