EP Musing: Saint Asonia - Extrovert

Sometimes, it seems like I'm perpetually annoyed. Both as a critic and a philosopher, I find it easy to nit-pick and find flaws in just about everything. They're usually easy enough to ignore, but at a certain point, when everything starts to annoy you, even that fact becomes annoying. And with the music industry in a state where no one knows how to release music, plenty of experiments are being done that wind up annoying me.

Case in point; Saint Asonia. I really liked their last album. For the genre of radio rock, it was excellent stuff, and far exceeded any expectations I might have had. I was just listening to the album a few days ago (as I write this), and it holds up really well. I was a fan.

Earlier this year, they put out an EP I also thought was pretty good. It didn't hit me quite as hard, but they still had good songs I enjoyed a fair amount. I was still on board with them.

Now, they're putting out their second EP of the year. This shouldn't matter, but it does. We're getting one album's worth of songs, but they're split up in two batches. The end result of that is to make things harder for those of us listening. The 'album experience' is gone, because to put the two EPs together into what would have been the album is to alternate between new songs and those we have already experienced. And I know I praised an album just last month that did something similar, but the situation is very different to me, because those were all singles we had been given in doses over the years, and there would have otherwise been no way to have them collected together. With these two EPs being released so close together, the band could have easily put them out as an album.

I will admit this much; not being a follower of the charts, I don't know how successful Saint Asonia was at making any or all of the tracks off "Introvert" into radio hits. This could all be me yelling at clouds if this was a massive success for them, but I can only give my experience with their music. That experience is one of frustration, as my attention has been divided between the two releases, and I tend to give EPs less attention to begin with. The whole thing set up to make me far less engaged with new Saint Asonia music than if they had put all these songs out as an album to begin with.

I also think this strategy didn't work for me, because Saint Asonia is making music by all the blueprints of radio rock. They do it very well, but it isn't a style of music I am energized by, and asking me to get excited about two batches of music that are nearly indistinguishable is asking too much of me. I only have so much energy to go around, and I'm going to struggle to be jazzed about something I've already hear just a few months ago.

With all that being said, "Extrovert" is once again high quality mainstream rock. I definitely enjoy these songs, and when I get around to putting both EPs together to listen to them in my preferred format, I'm sure I will find it a record nearly comparable to "Flawed Design". Saint Asonia is good at this, and I'm never going to take that away from them.

What I will do, though, is be honest about how the only way I was able to find enough to say about them again this soon was to look inside myself, and not in the music.