I’ll be honest, I was really impressed with the last Asteria record and had really high hopes for this mini-album – but it’s left me feeling a little flat. ‘The Taste, the Touch’ and a couple of other tunes off the album really hit the spot and looked like they would propel the band to the pop-punk premier leagues alongside Valencia and We The Kings. But for some reason this self-titled CD sounds a bit samey, generic and tired. The choruses aren’t as big, the riffs not as huge – something’s wrong.
This is still a reasonable record and had Asteria not set their standards very high I have no doubts I’d have liked this a little bit more, but there are very few stand outs on this record. The opening salvo of ‘I’ll Get You My Pretty (And Your Little Dog Too)’ and ‘Finding Love in a Bottle of’ are reasonable but lack a punch the last record had in abundance. The second of those two tracks is very wishy-washy; there’s a chorus fighting to break out but the chorus just doesn’t quite do it for me. Sadly for Asteria this record continues in the same vein the whole way through as they become the very nearly men of the pop-punk scene, almost cracking a smile and being close to a catchy chorus or three.
‘Pop Fiction’ is one of the better tracks here and ‘Hoods & Capers’ is great once it gets going, but there’s just something missing and I can’t put my finger on it. I guess it’s that killer touch. Asteria are better than the likes of Just Surrender and The Audition and the other pop-punk pretenders, but they will need to do better than this if they want world domination.