The debut album from Obits—the latest band to showcase
vocalist/guitarist Rick Froberg—is not what you might expect.
It doesn’t echo the blistering post-punk swirl of Hot Snakes, or the
avant-apocalypse grind of Drive Like Jehu. Joined by Edsel’s Sohrab
Habibion on guitar, Shortstack drummer Scott Gursky, and bassist Greg
Simpson, Froberg turns the clock back, rather than forward.
Jehu and Snakes both channeled a bleak futurism—Jehu’s epic
Yank Crime, from 1994, rendered hardcore as a kind of
unstoppable, mechanized pulse, and the Snakes’ fantastic Audit in
Progress articulated a sound befitting the landscape Mel Gibson
traversed in The Road Warrior.
The sound on I Blame You lacks that kind of nihilism and
filth. Froberg instead goes back to the roots of rock ‘n’ roll, looking
mainly to the mid-’60s garage rock of bands like The Zombies or The
Pretty Things. Songs like “Milk Cow Blues,” “SUD” and “Pine On” are
simple garage numbers on which Froberg’s vocals channel a plaintive
soulful growl more than a post-hard-core screech. There’s still a bit
of edge to songs like “Light Sweet Crude” and “Fake Kinkade,” but the
band never goes all-out punk like garage-revivalists The Peechees or
The Gories did. “Back and Forth” could actually have played back at the
sock hop alongside “Louie Louie.”
There are some odd moments, like “Run,” which sounds like Lee
Ranaldo channeling mid-’80s new wave, but most of I Blame You is
consistent, classic retro-rock.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2009.