Aster Tracks

“Yonder,” is the newest full-length by Russian-Australian duo Valiant Hearts. The band features Tom Byrne on vocals and the visual arts side as well as Igor Serovasha covering the instrumentation. It’s their third record and first I’ve ever heard but myself as well as readers of this blog are likely familiar with Byrne’s other band, Galleons, who put out top five albums for me personally in 2020 with Metropolis , then again just last year with their self-titled record. All that out of the way, though, as I said I had never heard any Valiant Hearts material other than the couple of singles at the tail end of 2021 but got a similar vibe to Galleons so I was pretty excited to get into this. The opening moments of the record on “Elysium” are fairly back and forth and a good sign of what’s to come. When you hit play on the record you’re greeted with this guitar riff that they bring back later as an outro and I do appreciate it there but as an opener feels like an instrumental half thought....

  Despite what Spencer Chamberlain says, Voyuerist is the ninth full-length album from Florida ex-Christian metalcore titans Underoath. It is the follow up to 2018’s Erase Me , which saw mixed reaction from fans. It was easy to see why though, as the band had come back from breaking up and was doing things they didn’t normally do. Chamberlain was cursing, they were using more traditional song structures and even renounced that Christianity that they had built certain circles with by writing songs about losing one's faith. For me, personally I was very much sold on Erase Me and was eagerly awaiting a follow up and I had a lot to mull over. There were four singles to this ten track record released over four or five months due to vinyl push backs even the first and last tracks were put out before release day. I had a good initial impression of the first single, “Damn Excuses.” Sonically it feels very Define the Great Line, just listen to the instrumentation and presentation around th...

Tribute Summon is the new album from the media universe that is Trust Fund Ozu. This is the third in this series created by Ashbury Park based producer, drummer, rapper and 3D artist, Faye Fadem. It’s the first to me though and the amount of content I could catch up on is daunting but nothing that’s left me unimpressed yet between the music or the part-animated, part-live action, part-lyric video music videos and that’s just what I’ve dived into so far. Prior to hearing this record all I knew about it was that it had a J.K. Rowling diss as I saw Fadem herself advertise it as such in a thread on Twitter and was curious about the album that it was attached to. I already knew by the end of the album intro, “Busy Signal,” that this was a special release. The track goes back and forth between a beautiful piano piece that sounds like it would be at home in the main menu of an RPG and something like what you think a hyperpop intro is. There will be whole passages where it seamlessly goes from...

A history on the formation of AsterTracks; In 2020 I joined a Discord server with a music channel that wasn’t overly active. So, being someone who had listened to hours upon hours of music I had never heard a week, I declared it my home in the server. Every week I had compiled everything I thought was worth bringing up and gave a short couple sentences making a case to check it out. That became the weekly format for this blog to start to grow. “Last week in music” was a great way to put a spotlight week after week on bands and artists I thought released something worthy of a conversation, be that good or bad in terms of quality. However, putting out that and a review every week was starting to affect the quality of work I was able to put forth. So, to kick off the blog returning to normalcy in 2022, I’ve decided to rebrand the whole project. Instead of week-to-week, on the first Monday of each month I will present to you a selection of albums and EPs and/or whatever other project catch...