Album Review: Aspiga - Every Last Piece

This review was originally published on DyingScene.

Aspiga is a three piece pop punk act hailing from New Jersey, whose only goal is to make people feel things. Running at only a mere seven tracks long, Every Last Piece (now out on Paper + Plastick Records), the band’s third studio album, takes a risky move by trimming off extraneous fat and aims right at the aural equivalent of a gut of the listener.

Every Last Piece is filled with self-loathing and aggressive riffing that would any 90’s punk rocker smile. Frontman Kevin Day’s vocals have a way of both snarling their way across the album, while also taking the time to find themselves deep in though. The first half of the album lashes out immediately and relentlessly: from the opening refrain of “Don’t you forget- because I won’t” in “Save Your Spit” to the repeated phrasing “I’ve discovered I hate myself” for a solid minute in “Welcome to the Sympathy Party”. Toward the end of the album, Day shows off his Schwarzenbach-ism’s, dropping lines of wisdom such as “I say what I don’t mean, it keeps me from feeling anything” or the introspective “So I dig until I find every last piece of me” in the album’s final two tracks, “On the Defensive“, and “The Excavation” respectively.

Musically the album finds itself somewhere along the lines of taking 24 Hour Revenge Therapy and injecting it with the energy of Through Being Cool. From the fast striking tracks that kick off the album, to the mellow paced middle, and the intricate instrumental work that closes things out, Every Last Piece finds the perfect balance between taking influence from what came before while never sounding exactly like its predecessors.

Aspiga is not your run-of-the-mill modern pop punk band, but rather the band is a dying breed in the pop punk realm, drowning in the waves of chugged breakdowns and gang vocal choruses about how much best friends are better than girlfriends. However, instead of simply laying down and accepting defeat, Aspiga churned out Every Last Piece, a filler-free and heavy hitting album that runs short on the playtime, but long on the impression it will leave on listeners.