AJJ ''Christmas Island'' (2014)

With Sean's tragic voice an this band's Folk Punk sound consisting of acoustic guitar, bass, drums and some electronic keyboard tunes they manage to put pure emotion an nerdy yet fantastic lyrics into song. Getting this album recommended to me by someone online at 4 am a year ago made this a surreal listening experience.

AJJ was my first dabble into Folk Punk, this band utilises it's key components of acoustic guitar, bass, and drums masterfully, but in this album they've strayed a bit from their roots, experimenting around with more electric guitar and synthesizers than before which turned out better than anyone could have expected. Sounds building up and having it all come back down on top of Sean's lyrics or gentle guitar picking, drums for keeping track and adding a bit of spice with brushes instead of sticks, and synthesizers keeping a friendly swooning tone. 

The first song on this record immediately sets the tone for a large portion of this album with lyrics like ''Find a nicer way to kill it'' which is a mean and angry (yet still positive) take on Temple Grandin's (the person) work to strive for a more humane way of setting animals up for slaughter. This cynicism is heard throughout your time listening to these songs.

The lyricism on this album is nerdy and near perfect, classic AJJ. They often touch on topics like poverty, humanity, religion, addiction and politics. This 30 minute record is no exception of that, managing to check the box on quite a few of them.

All in all I can describe this record as nothing short of emotional, meaningful and almost tragic with it's distortion on the synthesizers, guitar, and drums, forming a solid background for Sean to perform his wonders. I could go on about individual songs for another 400 words but that's not what this is about.

9/10

STARSET ''Transmissions'' (2014)

Me from 3 years ago was busy discovering new music when he landed on Transmissions, STARSET's debut album. I was instantly hit with the hard rock and electronic synths in the form of a beautifully crafted sound wall. This 1 hour long album was one of my early encounters with hard rock and really cemented my love for the genre. STARSET's front man and vocalist Dustin Bates blew me away with his incredible vocal range and screams, something I had never heard before at the time. Transmissions was the first album of a book and story written by Dustin, the cohesiveness of this record might just be it's most amazing part.

The aesthetics of this album and story is set in an alternate universe with sci-fi, space and astronomy galore! Instrumentation wise this band plays around with simple drums, ongoing synths and electronics on every track which drive home the theme of the record, additionally the electric guitar almost get drowned out which is a shame, but the cello and violin you can hear in the background of some tracks truly make up for it.

My favourite part of some of these tracks have to be Dustin's screams continuing throughout build ups and drops, his voice will drown out and synths, electronics and harmonics will take it's place, only for you to notice that the scream is still going on 30 seconds later, upon re listening you'll realise that he never stopped. The build ups and drops on these tracks are never disappointing, the wall of sound I described earlier doesn't actually exist, it's so well mixed and layered that you can perfectly pick out individual bits and pieces that form the intricate and complicated sound, it makes you wonder how this was their debut album with no previous releases of individual songs.

 

 Apart from sound STARSET has also mastered the lack of sound, with the layering falling away leaving only some white noise and giving the attention to an individual instrument or Dustin's voice which speaks deep lyrics only for it all to build up again and crash into something beautiful. STARSET is a band you can come back to anytime and listen through an album you've heard tens of times before yet there will still be new things and layers for you to pick out and put your focus on.

8/10