Sound Obsession

In recent years I've had trouble coming up with ten albums I really liked.  This year I had trouble paring down about thirty albums.  Suffice it to say, 2013 was a great year for music.  The following are my honorable mentions - ten albums that I really enjoyed, but didn't quite make my final "top ten."  Some came very close, but I had to make some tough decisions.  This is basically my runners-up list - not ranked, but ordered alphabetically.* Enjoy. . . . ASG: Blood Drive (6.5/10) 6. I hadn't heard of Wilmington, North Carolina, stoner/sludge rockers ASG until earlier this summer.  Turns out Blood Drive is their fifth album and it sounds like a lost gem from 1992.  All the hallmarks of that era are preserved and resurrected brilliantly here as if Creed and Nickleback never existed to piss all over them - the angst, the beauty, and the riffs.  Vocalist Jason Shi displays uncanny range, emulating both Perry Farrell's nasal rasp a...

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Date:  October 2, 2013 Venue:  Rams Head Live, Baltimore, MD Since I'd been working on my review of BRMC's latest album Specter At The Feast earlier this week ,  I thought it'd be appropriate to hit up their live show at Rams Head Live in Baltimore last night.  I had already attended their sold out 930 Club show in DC this past May, so I was pleasantly surprised by the smaller crowd this time.  In fact, it was an intimate affair by comparison, with plenty of room to move about, rock out, do a little air guitar, or sway and grind with a partner.     Peter Hayes (left), Leah Shapiro (center), and Robert Levon Been (right) Yeah, that's right, I had almost forgotten how damn sexy a BRMC show could be.  The focus of my Specter At The Feast album review was on the snotty rawk  these guys do so well, but their repertoire is full of great slow jams like "Screaming Gun," "Shade of Blue," and new tra...

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club:   Specter At The Feast Label:  Vagrant Released:  March 19, 2013 6.5/10 In the summer of '07, as a weird personal exercise, I decided it'd be fun to check out more bands with the word "black" in their name.  There seemed to be a ton of 'em, and having "black" somewhere in there appeared to be code for " rawk!"    I was still on a big Black Sabbath kick from the year prior, and The Black Keys' Magic Potion  had been in rotation on the hi-fi too*.  Black Rebel Motorcycle Club had just released their fourth album Baby 81 and I liked the album cover  with the sexy Gibson ES-335 on it, splintered and fractured as if to say there was just too much rawk happening here!  I decided to finally check this band out. BRMC, as they're known to fans who have no time to say the whole damn name, are a greasy three-piece rock band from San Francisco who launched during the garage rock revival of the ear...