A peculiar release - in that the two halves seem to have nothing to do with one another. The first four tracks are by Lilys and are resurrected from sessions recorded around the time of A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns and Eccsame the Photon Band. At this point, Lilys were between homages and letting their own sense of slightly warped popcraft create knotty, tangled structures that nevertheless resolved themselves into appealing little popsong sculptures. It's a given that Lilys are genius--and in some ways that genius shines through most directly, with least reflected light, on Eccsame and in these four tracks. The Aspera ad Astra tracks are far more recent--recorded in January of 2000--and demonstrate that Drew Mills, Justin Tripp, and Matt Werth had the excellent taste to listen to Rollerskate Skinny in the middle years of the last decade. That band sadly dissipated into a couple of lesser groups (Lotus Crown, Kid Silver), so it's apt that someone carry on their legacy. The two bands share a rolling melodicism, penchant for somewhat martial percussion, and song structures tending toward the elaborate: suite-like without coming off like some sort of classical gas attack. Although the two sets of songs here appear to have little to do with one another, both bands share a love for the less linear approaches to song structure while retaining that genre's necessary melodic/harmonic sweet-tooth. Well worth picking up as a sampler-like introduction to either band's work.

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