Aster Tracks

Hi! I just wanted to jump on here quickly to do a little announcement for my annual best of month. If you were around last year you may remember we did one post a week for the entire month of December where we did a top ten for every basic category and then shared a spread sheet with a top fifty for each category. This year, we're doing things a bit differently. December is still best of month; it also starts tomorrow. We are still doing one post a week with different categories: top ten EPs and top ten singles. I wanted to do something a little different this year and so I reached out to some of the artists I've made little connections with running this blog and asked them if they would come on and share their favorite music of 2022 and I was blown away by the responses I received. So, for our first Monday post we'll be sharing that followed by the more traditional personal choice categories. Where does that leave albums though? Well, 2022 was really special in terms of re...

They told me “fake it till you make it.” Back in June, Dumfries, VA’s pulses. gave me a preview of their new era by allowing me to hear “XO,” their collaboration with Zac Benson, a bit early and now that the year is winding down that track is coming back up in a big way as I decide on my favorite songs of the year. Now, they’ve given me another sneak peak and while it wasn’t supposed to be this way, it is! It’s another hit too but before we get into it I want to thank pulses. for making me feel like I found my place in this community. When I started this blog all I wanted was to have a conversation about my favorite music and now, I get to share yet another pulses. single before it hits streaming services this Friday. The intro of this one grabs me immediately in the same way that “Exist Warp Brakes” off Speak it into Existence did back in 2020 while managing to stay so fresh and fit right into the new sound. Kevin delivers this spoken word intro with a hint of near irony in his voice....

  Despite missing Breakup Season’s initial release it became an all time favorite of mine. I used it to mend a broken heart over the summer and have clung to a lot of its songs for a year or two now. If you followed this blog last year you’ll remember the huge impression Deliberately Alive left on me as well. In a similar way to their releases, Future Teens is a band that means so much to me even though I sort of feel like I’m on the outside looking in. Boston was where I went to see basically all my live music when I lived in New England even though I was roughly an hour out and yet seeing a set of theirs somehow always eluded me. Now their third record, Self Help , is here. As we’ll explore below this record is helping me develop my own methods of coping and generally managing my emotions. Between parents who were just as stressed as I was and an abusive high school sweetheart I never really learned or was allowed to manage my emotions. What I do know, however, is to use musi...

  For my season two finale I did a review of the standard edition of Nocturnal which also served as an essay about my own sleep patterns and burnout. With the year end lists coming up I won’t hit you with anything else too personal here seeing as a deluxe edition of the record is delivering an EPs worth of new music from McKenzie Ellis I wanted to think about the four new songs critically as a final review of the year. The first of the new songs is a new version of “LULLABY” with an added feature from Australian multidisciplinary artist Aviva Payne. Compared to the base song I feel AViVA tries and fails to recreate the magic of the original second verse and comes up short both lyrically and vocally. It's certainly not a feature that draws me to check out a new artist and I feel I was just fine with the original version. I really enjoy the sentiment of “S.T.A.R.,” which discusses artists being conned into using their pain for fame and fortune until they’re used up, only truly servi...

  Kero Kero Bonito, to me, is one of the most important bands in the indie scene. From the outside it feels like a lot of people just view them as the band that wrote “Flamingo” and then write off the rest as probable other joke songs and I don’t really feel that’s fair. You can imagine, having this big of an admiration, how much I was looking forward to vocalist Sarah Bonito announcing a solo endeavor. I even had a Cryalot shirt a year or two before there was even a single out. On Icarus, Sarah proves that she is just as capable a producer as either of her bandmates. Every bit of programming and songwriting is masterfully done. She makes vocal chops sound like an art form. The sequencing and transitioning from section to section of songs are so smooth. On “Hell is Here” we get proof of something I had long confirmed from two KKB live shows; Sarah is hard as fuck at her core despite her polite and shy demeanor. This project also satiates my hunger for something resembling KKB’s li...

  Hold the Girl is the sophomore album by Japanese-British artist Rina Sawayama. After the 2020 debut I was left impressed by the modern pop and nu metal fusions and how willing Sawayama was to show her scars to the world and eagerly awaited a follow up. However as the singles to this new record were released I honestly felt more and more underwhelmed. This record itself wasn’t really a let down and in context of the entire project I felt great about some of the songs themselves, including singles that I didn’t love, I just don’t feel it's as strong a record as Sawayama and shares one of its deepest flaws on top of that. As much as I did have a great first few listens of both these projects they both begin to feel stale fast and I don’t feel drawn to repeat listens as a whole body of work, just a song here or there. I do, however, have to applaud the risks taken here as Sawayama herself does go outside her lane quite a bit and while I don’t think it sticks the landing all the time ...