Review: The Obsessed “Sacred”

The Obsessed “Sacred”
Relapse records

Here we have real veterans and I’ll don’t afraid to say, a legend of hard playing. To be precise, veterans and legend of American scene. But except state (Maryland) I can’t tell you anything more about their place of origin. So it seems that musicians come from different cities of this not so large, but quite populous state on eastern coast of USA.

Anyway, THE OBSESSED was found in 1980, but its roots are four years earlier when WARHORSE was born. As I see they had quite long breaks in their career. Generally they always took few years. But even if they were so long, the band has quite rich discography. Of course if not these breaks it’d be much richer, but I’m sure that they weren’t something what Scott “Wino” Weinrich planed and was happy of. Contrary – only the fact of several come backs is evidence how important this band is for him! Anyhow, lecture of band’s biography is real lesson of history.

By the way, “Sacred” is their sixth album (if we’ll count two live albums which saw the light of day in 2012: “Live at the Melkweg November 28th 1992” and “Live Music Hall Köln December 29th 1992”) of Marylanders. It contains twelve songs diversified when it’s about length, but not stylistically. We have here big (a little more than forty three minutes long) piece of old good Hard Rock! The guys say about Doom Rock also to describe their creativity. Well, some riffs really connotes even with sub-genre of Metal which calls Doom. It’s not about this, let’s say, extreme Doom Metal, but THE OBSESSED is one of pioneers of such playing in the States. These riffs aren’t maybe something what so called average Metalhead thinks about typical ones for Doom, but they’re noticeable as well – of course if someone listen to music carefully enough. Scott plays variable and even if he repeats several riffs (what’s not rule) he changes them quite often. And they’re with really small exceptions   as they should be in music like that. We have also something what we can classify as solo sometimes, but it takes place rarely – songs’ structure is how it is and there’s not so many place for such displays. Drums and bass are also playing variously as well. There aren’t some “fireworks” here, but it’s about character of this music. It means that leading instrument here is guitar and that’s Wino’s job. His job is also to sing. That’s truth – Brian (Costantino – drums) and Dave (Sherman – bass) participate in vocal parts, too. But main singer is Scott and he does it good. Somebody could of course say that it’s just a typical way of singing for Hard Rock. Well, probably it is, but who cares!

I like this band and it’s really great that Wino is so dogged (maybe even piggish – in positive meaning of this word) and gave a new lease of life to THE OBSESSED again! Everyone who likes to listen at least from time to time to classic should grab this album. And if doesn’t know earlier creativity of the band – get know this as quickly as possible.