January 2007 AstroPOP! is brought to you by the King-Beast of Broken Resolutions (I break ‘em like an animal! Grrr!), Chris Estey.

Capricorn (December 22 - January 19)
Capricorn knows that communication does not exist by words alone, as moody but mirthful artists like Woody Guthrie and Jimmie Rodgers knew so well. This decades-haunted joy and sanguine pining all mixed up together, is captured on the album Grand Forks by Tom Brosseau. Every lilting, melancholy, cheap motel on the edge of Sunday afternoon Depression toe-tapper here is a sweet keeper especially: The (tragically) politically relevant "Skid Row," the John Doe of the Band X-assisted "Fork In The Road," and the gently soaring "I Fly Wherever I Go." There is nobody quite like Tom Brosseau, evoking back porch ing-to-your-friends troubadours you've partied with and shared moonshine with on serendipitous nights visiting your hometown. But this small sentimental masterpiece and bring some back with you to the city. There is nothing else quite like it in your record collection.

Capricorn Added Vice For The New Year: Capricorns don't gossip enough, leaving the rest of us to carry the conversations. Talk smack more!

Aquarius (January 20 - February 18)
The Trolleyvox present The Karaoke Meltdown by The Trolleyvox is perfect Aquarius music for beginning the new year. Cleanly splashing like the stream of water the sign of Aquarius is based on, this is veteran female-charged power pop that purely refreshes. You may be feeling a strong sense of déjà vu this time around, as utopian urges you have are reflected in the technological progress made around you. The intelligent optimism and sharp insights of songwriter-guitarist Andrew Chalfen and the pagan-powered vocals of Beth Filla make this a sexier way to evolve. Filla's vocals are almost too perfect, it's like she's there in her Philadelphia-pad room with you, seductively lighting incense and candles, and putting something in your drink as you bob your head to the tunes. There is a health and wide-open sheen to songs like "Stoplight Roses" and "I Know That You're High" that remind one of the early 90s (when alternative rock seemed capable of anything) while touching on traces of 60s psychedelic rompers from some acid trip movie. Not heavy in any direction, producer Adam Lasus (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) records his finest band yet.

Aquarius Added Vice For The New Year: As the Age of Aquarius is about life-improving inventions, feel free to do more five finger discounts at Radio Shack.

Pisces (February 19 - March 20)
You're a wide awake boy, Pisces, and full of emotional puddles. January is a dark month and like bedroom maestro Ron Lewis, you might feel the need to creatively mope until spring. Quixoticism is the romantic, paranoid, funny, and prickly debut from his project Ghost Stories, full of strumming, electronic drumming, and hum-to-yourself bumming out. A suffering eleven-slice stack of bittersweet loner-bop, the imagery serves a Pisces well, with blood on fire, vampires resisting a loser's own life-force, and psychic hardship in the stream of relationships. Keyboard string swells and chimes throughout oscillating tempos in songs like the new "Loser" anthem "Even A Vampire Wouldn't Drink My Blood," and elsewhere. You never know where it will go, but it's always fun, and will satisfy fans of misfit rock everywhere. A why-bother-leaving-the-house hit of the year.

Pisces Added Vice For The New Year: Just getting outdoors and maybe to the nearest bar will seem transgressive enough, let's not push it with a Pisces' fragile sensibility.

Aries (March 21 - April 19)
Famous Aries women include Lucy Lawless and Diana Ross, and for Aries this month that kind of warrior-soul is all over the Portland-based mostly folky material on the generous new compilation Safe Haven, which benefits Portland's Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center. Buying this twenty track anthology puts money into a great cause, giving developing young people an emotional home in the midst of hetero-sexist culture. In return you get acoustic sexy torch songs like Cynthia Williams' "Lidda Bidda Bliss," the electrified snarl and stomp of Sleater-Kinney on "Keep On Livin'" and the great warm strong storytelling of the Indigo Girls on "Dairy Queen." The Decemberists' Chris Funk helped coordinate this project, and the band contributes a song as well, the beloved "A Soldiering Life." While I haven't heard of many of these artists otherwise (could be a Seattle thing on my part), there is nothing here that is unpleasant, and Pink Martini's "Sympathique" and Alix Olsen's "Cute For A Girl" (spoken word) will make an Aries feel all gushy and warm in this cold winter month. So feel empowered, Aries, the season for amore is yours!

Aries Added Vice For The New Year: The Vice of Freedom, or so the hanging-on powers of be would have us believe.

Taurus (April 20 - May 20)
Taureans are reflections of the first magnitude stars, thus the reputation for both bull-like behavior and the sensuous reputation that comes of being ruled by the House of Venus. Twisted passion is the theme this month, just as it is on the new album by cult-hero Dave Fischoff titled The Crawl This is gushing, glimmering, intricate electro-pop, with hooks battering down on each other but never seeming overwhelming. Dave collects lots of samples from the Chicago Public Library sound system, but it doesn't sound like a cacophony, more like a pleasuring pop sound collage. His raspy voice tends to stay in the same place through every song, from the tremulous "Landscape Skin" to the stately "The Matrimony Vine," so the big moods tend to come from the music. As Taurus is fond of big moods, this would be a nice place to turn the chill to happiness, as every song seems to do on The Crawl. Taurus Added Vice For The New Year: Dating a librarian, in order to gain access to illicit reference books.

Gemini (May 21 - June 21)
There is an ageless spirit to Gemini, a bottomless fount of energy that can be most inspring to their friends. The best music for that kind of energy is to match it with the brisk, buoyant toe-tappers of the Scottish-music compilation called Get While The Gettings Good. Tracks from alternative-world chartbusters like Camera Obscura, Kid Twist, and Tibi Lubin bracingly bounce from drunken story-songs to bass-thrummed hummers with acoustic plucking before cascading into a beautiful core of pure manic pop thrills. There's a reason the Scots are considered blessed at this pastoral pop thing by underground rock connoisseurs, and this 19-track sampler encompasses everything you've ever loved about Teenage Fanclub and more. Old schoolers will love seeing Pop Group guitarist Garath Sager return on that intoxicated opening narrative, while newcomers Bricolage beat down the dance-rock doors to your heart. Gemini, even with all the instrumentals, you have an album to keep up with you this first month of the year!

Gemini Added Vice For The New Year: A little more Scotch to the diet may not do much to help the waistline, but will help you not to care as much.

Cancer (June 22 - July 22)
Cancer has a familial nature that makes for a good mate. Because they're so friendly and easy to get along with, Cancers know how to party, and that's what the album Chops by legendary loopy lovable Gorky's Zygotic Mynci front man Euros Childs seems to be all about. This is a charming little record, reflecting its dialogue with The Magic Numbers and Devandra Banhart. It has a weird world music flavor that is charming and slight, as if made on a sparkling island out beyond the coastal sea foam, strummed on guitars in row boats battering the shores. Euros has been doing this since before he was a teenager, and its seamless song craft is assured. It goes by like a poof, but the melodies of love shack disco "Donkey Island" and the twinkling "Costa Rita" (which would be ubiquitous yacht rock if 70s radio could be resurrected), stay stuck to the ribs. Welcome this freak in for your New Year's party for sure.

Cancer Added Vice For The New Year: You know, as Bill Hicks once said, a little mushroom trip every now and then to open up the third eye wouldn't hurt.

Leo (July 23 - August 22)
"She bites me on the cheek, contained in a kiss, I move to slap her face, but how could I hit." Leo is very openly dramatic, and a line like that could be considered heavy, yet sublimely evokes barbed wire passion played out by Cranebuilders on the deluxe American edition of Sometimes You Hear Through Someone Else. This is an album of the kind of trembling, ambivalent rootsy stuff Lambchop and Tindersticks fans will be thrilled with, though with a lighter, countrified touch, and a bit of a Scottish pop lilt. Chock full of stark, mesmeric tracks already, potential fans should find the addition of a score of great Brit EP tracks an irresistible lure. "So What Could I Do" is the bounciest guitar-gritty psychodrama you'll hear all season, and every word of a mid-tempo trance like "She Can't Find The Words" makes sure you won't give up till you find out why. "Soap Opera Rant" adds a tense garage rock vibe, but doesn't lay up on the narrative.

Leo Added Vice For The New Year: An affair or two to add spice and eventual violence to your existence.

Virgo (August 23 - September 22)
You have a servant's heart, Virgo, and don't mind the need for purity to be an affective one. Friend and Foe, the dozen incredibly inventive, creative, and hypnotizing progressive pop songs that make up the new album by Menomena, features a confident and grooving experimentalism that can be liberating, even if the oblique subject matter can inspire consternation. Ruled by Mercury, with a shapely figure, Virgo sings through Menomena with beauty and trauma, as acoustic guitars, deft rock drumming, clinking piano, fuzzy bass all collapse on the blinding energy behind the angular art-gospel of "Air Raid," "Rotten Hell," and "Wet and Rusting." Combining Chi-town post-rock with Pac NW avant-garage, Danny Seim, Justin Harris, and Brent Knopf have just collaborated on what might become the year's most intimately beloved release on Barsuk.

Virgo Added Vice For The New Year: Your vice is our virtue, sign of the virgin! I would not begin to suggest anything to deform such character.

Libra (September 23 - October 23)
The Besnard Lakes new album, The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse, is a sweeping palette of crystal clear art-damaged rock, drawing deeply from such unlikely sources as the Beach Boys and Pink Floyd. Disturbing images tumble out in the songs, as if the acid is starting to kick in, and you have a vague sense things aren't going to be the same for the next few hours. This is good for Libra, for January is filled with change, as last year's frivolity will need to become next years' desperate diplomacy. Sort of the way The Besnard Lakes could drown these diverse sparkling sounds in warm nothingness, but are instead drawing out a fantastic Fleetwood Mac pop song over 46 minutes, with all the obsession squeezed to the surface. It takes its time but isn't "slow-core," just like Libra's friendliness can often be flirtatiousness, and vice versa.

Libra Added Vice For The New Year: Long slow deep kisses with people you just met at parties.

Scorpio (October 24 - November 21)
Extremes in passion and power mark the Scorpio, and even though you may have been crushed by the doors to life's temple at one time, apparently this year you are far from giving up. That is why we love you so much, and also love the Chicago band Chin Up Chin Up. On their second full-length This Harness Can't Ride Anything they continue the dazzling display of diamond-shining guitar tones and drawling vocals liable to say anything, showing so much spunk in the midst of so much indie rock competition. Shanlging, jangling, jingling, and spangling, these six strings never stop squeezing out sparks. They sort of remind me of a Red Lorry Yellow Lorry on Prozac. There are many bands that sound a little like Chin Up Chin Up but this band avoids the hoary angst and dour poseur sulk that smears most of the rest. The title track is a crisp run to the spring, something I'm sure sunny weather loving Scorpio will appreciate. Themes of running keep up through the album, making this the perfect i-Pod material for joggers-with-good-music-taste everywhere.

Scorpio Added Vice For The New Year: Peace would be a good vice for Scorpio to pursue. A peaceful life would certainly feel different enough to be a strange pleasure for them.

Sagittarius (November 22 - December 21)
Hey, Sugar is the first full-length from Bossanova. It may sound like a band and album by Sagittarius favorite Magnetic Fields, but one man band Chris Sorrow (great name) goes back to the very early 80s for his Postcard Records synth-pop sound. Friends from Black Mountain and New Pornographers help out, but it still seems like a fairly intimate affair, and one amazingly assured for a debut. That's why Sagittarius might find the croony vocals of Sorrow's almost as elegant and seductive as a certain Mr. Merritt's. "Calvary" is grand monumental wall of sound cinema soundtrack pop, and should be a twelve inch single immediately.

Sagittarius Added Vice For The New Year: Every other weekend on ecstasy and a new sampler.