In clean­ing out my Douban mails over the hol­i­days, I came across new song noti­fi­ca­tions for two of my favorite bands — Ashura & The Life Jour­ney.

Let’s start with Life Jour­ney, just because their songs were added most recently. They have two new songs out: Marry and 小南 (xiǎo nán). They were released days before the Chi­nese New Year hol­i­day and came with an adorable New Years mes­sage video on Youku (embed­ded below the cut). These songs aren’t exactly dif­fer­ent from your stan­dard Life Jour­ney fare — they still sound like lul­la­bies that you should lis­ten to with a cup of Eng­lish Break­fast tea while wear­ing your favorite grey cardi­gan — but they’re new, and that’s the most impor­tant thing for a band that hasn’t had new tracks in nearly a year.

I def­i­nitely like 小南 the best: it’s a bit more catchy in its lullaby-ness. It was inspired by mem­o­ries of their child­hood town, and you can def­i­nitely hear that influ­ence in the music as well as the lyrics. The lilt­ing melody and the gen­tle xylo­phone play­ing in the back­ground behind the acoustic gui­tar remind me of children’s music, and the style really matches Yann’s voice. Marry is appro­pri­ate for the song it is, but it moves a lit­tle too slowly for me. It def­i­nitely feels like a wed­ding waltz — with a bit of a rock break­down with the elec­tric gui­tar at the end — and the cho­rus sung in adorable Eng­lish is great. It’s a very sen­ti­men­tal song, but it’s cute. If only they’d up the tempo…

Ashura’s new songs also aren’t exactly a depar­ture from their pre­vi­ous sound, but they’re def­i­nitely fur­ther steps in the “pop punk” direc­tion and away from their metal roots. You can still hear it very slightly at the end of Come On Sing This Song, but it’s prac­ti­cally non-existant in U R The Only One. The two tracks also sound pretty sim­i­lar to each other, but that’s not really much sur­prise. While I love pop punk most days, and Ashura is a great pop punk group, I have to say that it’s not a genre that lends itself to musi­cal diver­sity. I do love these tracks, though. They’re very upbeat and will be so much fun per­formed live.

The third song they uploaded on the same day def­i­nitely dif­fer­ent, though. You can hear the echoes of their metal past in the bass and drums, and it’s a slower song. From the acoustic gui­tar intro, you can tell that it’s going to be a dif­fer­ent sound­ing song. It’s not an uplift­ing song. The refrain of “tell me why” run­ning through­out, espe­cially when cou­pled with the sound of peo­ple cry­ing, is quite haunt­ing. It’s obvi­ously an emo­tional song, and sounds like a bit of a whinier ver­sion of Evanes­cence. It’s not the type of pop punk I like, but I’ll def­i­nitely take a new Ashura song where I can get it!