Aster Tracks

On a Friday afternoon my partner asked me to watch the new Mean Girls musical assuming we’d both laugh it off and forget about it. We watched, were completely captivated, saw it again in theaters and even, by seemingly fate, got to see a touring stage production of it less than a week ago. What I thought would be a lark is now instead a hyper fixation album for both of us. Every character in this story not only has their own sets of songs but are each assigned totally unique genres and functions within the story. Starting the record and movie off, Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey, who play Janis and Damian, are the most showtune, classic musical of the cast. Their songs serve as set dressing, they establish the narration of the story and slowly build the lore of North Shore High and its students almost exclusively from the sidelines. They explain the cliques, don’t assign themselves to any and only really signify themselves as the queer kids.  Angourie Rice plays Cady Heron and h...

The timeline told me a Green Day album was good in 2024 and I regret to inform you the timeline was right. Part of my apprehension going into Saviors was its lead single and opening track, “The American Dream is Killing Me,” a truly abhorrent song. Here Green Day attempt to recreate the magic of past, more effective tracks they’ve put on the same stage as “American Dream,” such as the openers to American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown. It’s more or less just bad folk punk with an out of touch, wealthier view of what makes the current state of the United States so stressful and dangerous for so many diverse groups of people. Don’t want no huddled masses, TikTok and taxes. Under the overpass sleeping on broken glass. And granted, a lot of the record isn’t much different, songs like “Look Ma, No Brains” are fine Green Day songs with entry level politics and they’re sort of upholding good points on a not extraordinarily thought out album. A lot of it feels like its leftist Twitter postin...

  On their sixth full-length Neck Deep do what they set out to do and they do it well. Every single track here is huge in a way only Warped tour was huge. Infectious riffs, catchy choruses, maybe a quip or vulgarity to make it really stick in your teenage mind. We even do blink-182 double time on “Sort Yourself Out,” the second track where all these things are in their strongest form. It’s big, it’s attachable to nostalgia, it’s attachable to almost anybody. You probably know someone who is more than a little messy and has made you feel put out at one point or another. Frontman Ben Barlow has become a really good lyricist by making pop punk lyrics as relatable as possible without leaning into toxic masculinity. He writes in the same way he probably talks, there’s a tinge of sarcasm but it’s always believable. Granted, he also sneaks in some Facebook-isms like emphasizing he’s “so sick of this planet” on “Take Me with You.” And to be honest it’s not really much to do with fucking fl...

Took me weeks to review this one sixty-three minutes is a long time. It’s hard to break plastic death into pieces as it feels more like an experience than a collection of songs working together. Instrumentally glass beach go on a journey on plastic death . The early parts of the record are somewhere between mathcore and cinema and, like the ocean getting darker the deeper you go, it gets stranger and stranger the further down you dive. Nothing ever quite sounds like you expect it to, opening track “coelacanth” has an outro I would call grandiose but also it’s untuned, discordant, almost clunky and yet still effective. No track on the whole project really sticks to one lane though, like the aughts-core slash big triumph mess on “motions.” This is my introduction to glass beach so I have no prior context, but when I personally like plastic death most is when they’re jamming instrumentally as vocally I sort of feel a lack of inspiration. Songs like “cul-de-sac” work for me sonically but f...