New Asha Ali single & Chungking's new album

The other day I noticed on Asha Ali's MySpace page that "These Months" had been deleted from the playlist and a brand new track, "A Promise Broken," had been added in its place. The new song has a quite different sound than that of her debut album. This is apparently attributable to the song being for a movie. The vocals are really strong though, and it's certainly nice to hear something new. There's a good, short review of the song, as well as a higher quality file of the song than the streaming version that plays at MySpace over at It's A Trap.

Also, it's been almost a month since Chungking's new album, Stay Up Forever, was officially released. Chungking's debut album (which was released twice: first as We Travel Fast in 2003, and then re-recorded and rereleased as The Hungry Years in 2005) was very laid back, and all about Jessie Banks' beautiful, lush vocals. Stay Up Forever, on the other hand, is pure electro-sleaze bliss. The music is now on equal footing with Banks' vocals, and the album starts off with a breakneck pace that I would have thought uniminaginable after listening to We Travel Fast/The Hungry Years more times than I can count.

The only thing I don't like about the album is track #5, "I Love You," which brings the breakneck pace of the first few songs to a dead halt 1/3 of the way through the album (is that the point?). While the tracks on the tail end of the album do slow down, this is fine since it would be disconcerting if the album were to end while still at the full-tilt pace established by the first few tracks. I think the album would be much better without "I Love You," and instead had a more gradual transition from the fast early songs to the slower songs at the end. The CD single for Love Is Here To Stay, the first single from the album, has an excellent b-side called "Jeans On." I think this song should have taken the place of "I Love You" on the album. If this were the case, this album would have been just about perfect.