When I find myself enjoying a new album, my brain likes to
index it according to what I might do while listening. Would I go running to this? Scream along while driving? Play it softly in the background while
reading comics? With so much new music
out there, I need to determine pretty quickly how a record will fit into my
life. And my absolute top,
best-of-the-best rating, what Pulp
Fiction, Die Hard and Dark City are
to my movie collection, is, “I’d listen to this while walking through the city
on a gray, chilly evening, imagining myself as an inhabitant of some
futuristic, post-apocalyptic urban landscape.”
Yes, it’s extremely specific, but I’ll tell you this: if a piece of music has what it takes to
secure that categorization in my personal ranking system, I’ve found a
winner. This is stuff that, if I could
time-travel, I'd go back to 1981 and beg Ridley Scott to let me score Blade Runner with. A few such recordings that reside in that
canon for me are Ball of Molten Lead by
Yob, rockets fall on Rocket Falls by
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and In
Fiction by Isis.
At least three songs on ASG’s Blood Drive (Avalanche, Day’s Work, and the title track) make
that cut, which is saying a lot. I've
also owed ASG a review since 2013. That summer, a few weeks after interviewing
singer Jason Shi for a planned writeup on a new online music resource, my iPad
with the interview recording on it was stolen.
I replaced it, but by then the record wasn't new anymore, plus my
publication channel had pivoted from a music site into a hub for online
multimedia collages that lost me at "multimedia," then lost me again
at "collages."
Blood Drive is two
years old, but you'd never know it, which is one of ASG's strengths‒2007's Win Us Over still has its
fresh-from-the-factory sheen, too. The
notable difference between the albums are that Win Us Over was more of a straight-ahead rocker, whereas Blood Drive takes its time with a
slower, thicker texture and some ethereal moments. Crushing, mid-tempo behemoths are broken up
by quieter sections and searing, knockin’-on-the-sky solos.
Shi himself is the most distinctive thing about ASG. He began his frontman journey in snarling/shouting
punk territory, but made the conscious decision to add clean-sung vocal
melodies to offset the band’s massive riffage.
It’s fortunate that he did, because he has one of the purest
upper-register voices I’ve ever heard cutting across such sludgy foundations.
I feel like this band gets overlooked a bit, maybe in favor
of their grittier cousins Red Fang or Torche, the latter of whom even Shi
agrees has pretty much perfected the synthesis of soaring vocal harmonies and
driving riff-dirges. He's selling his
own band short, though, if he doesn't think they're in the same league.
Blood Drive's twelve tracks cruise from warm Carolina
blacktops to bleak concrete-and-steel dystopias. They pummel you with glorious volume, gently
help you to your feet, then crush your ass again. It’s rustbelt America meets the used-universe
future, simultaneously cathartic and transcendent. I'm just glad I finally
got the chance to write about it.
- MeteorJadd
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