Astral Cloud Ashes is a multi-instrumentalist project band formed 2016 and based on the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands by Antony Walker. Recently he released his second album on the 4th of May titled “Dear Absentee Creator”
I was a bit worried when I received the album because I am not lately satisfied with the new releases of alternative, indie and emo albums. But when I started to get through the album I realized that I was totally mistaken about that feeling. The album includes 11 tracks offers a nice mixed variety of emo/pop-punk/alt-rock/ and indie.
Walker is influenced by both the rise of bitcoin and Japanese culture and he expressed that very well to his listeners; “There’s a Japanese theme running through this record. I wrote the songs on this album whilst getting more and more fascinated by the world of cryptocurrency which is another massive passion of mine. There’s a lot of speculation that the mysterious and unknown creator of Bitcoin may be Japanese or that the digital currency may have originated from Japan, I was certainly influenced by the developments in the crypto world while I was writing the songs and It led to the overall theme for the album being a broadly ‘Japanese’ one! I also used a few samples of traditional Japanese instruments like the Koto to create ambient sound beds under the guitars on a lot of the songs” – Antony Walker.
It seems that he was very keen for the music production outcome. The recording took between December 2016 to November 2017 and that appears through his raw and grungy vocal styles which gives a nice mood for the album. Also, his choice of the acoustic and lead guitar lines with the other elements like the piano are extremely amazing. As mentioned earlier that Walker was very smart for choosing his production methods carefully and due to the long process of the album recording it faced various mixing engineers in several studios but it mainly recorded at Mapley Studios. For sure, all music and lyrics written by Antony Walker except Drums on track 1, 3 and 9 by Max Saidi, Piano and some backing vocals on track 11 by James Elliott Field, also some backing vocals on track 2; Cymbals on track 8 by Melle Brouwer and mastered by Tim Turan.
I could see that all songs follows a smooth melodic direction, either in music or the vocal-lines. The album features a nice music video titled “Grateful for the Ghost in our House” as much as I got confused because it’s not mentioned in the 11 tracks of the album but I noticed most of his tracks are getting long titles, which people aren’t fond of these days.
Walker streams “Dear Absentee Creator” publicly on SoundCloud, and available to order through Spotify or BandCamp. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a birth of a new era of alt/emo and indie rock and definitely I am waiting for his next releases.