The group got a second shot on 1972's Mother/Bow to the King, which was a bit lighter in tone, but equally painful in many places.

If Mountain could be considered an extension of Cream's psychedelic power-trio approach into the 70's, then Philadelphia, PA's Bang were basically a low-rent, three-pronged, sleaze-take on Black Sabbath and Grand Funk Railroad, with their debut being the most impactful of the three original albums they released. Impactful is not synonymous with enjoyable, however, as presentation and overall atmosphere make for a hazy, depressing listen at best.

Formed from the ashes of session musicians from the Classics IV (a 60’s soft-rock act known for a couple of hits, like “Spooky” and “Traces”) and some other band whose name I can’t recall, they eventually convalesced around Studio One in Doraville, Georgia. The good thing about this CD is that all of the best material these guys ever put to tape is here in one place. Actually, that covers both the good and bad points about this disc - every album I have heard of these guys consists of one or two decent tracks (which were the chart hits) followed by a sea of nondescript filler. But then again, even the chart hits had lackluster moments and/or were guilty pleasures at best.

Angel was cast as the literal anti-thesis to Kiss – they wore white, angelic-themed outfits, mixed high-brow, quasi-progressive arrangements with hard rock, but otherwise, had the same basic aim as Kiss did – to take the country by storm using a flashy, pop-metal derived approach. It’s easy to peg this as a Kiss-meets-Styx kind of experience, then, but the guitar work and arrangements are far beyond anything Kiss even dreamed about doing at the time. “Tower” and “Long Time” alone have much more in common with the Todd Rundgrens and Argents of the day than a bunch of gorilla simpletons like Kiss. Angel’s problem was making this stuff interesting for anyone beyond stoned teenagers, which, by the way, was the same issue bands like Styx and Kansas used to have. Only when Styx and Kansas had crossover ballads and rockers did those guys start to have real success. It works better when the band sticks to more straight-forward power pop like “Rock and Rollers”, But more often than not, that is not what this album is about. So, in a technical sense, these guys had it in spades, but as far as this album goes, something gets lost in translation emotionally, that is for sure.

The Accused were from Seattle and came up with their own sarcastic hybrid of punk, metal, and horror-inspired content and imagery that put a lot of other serious practitioners to shame. I had heard a few of their songs and albums, and one day came across this CD used somewhere real cheap, then snapped it up. Turns out, it was really just a hodge-podge of odds and ends thrown together for an EP. The actual style of The Accused is pretty crazy to begin with – they play fast, loud, and mean, but not like speed metal fast – the overall sound gives the impression of a victim trying to desperately stumble away from its’ killer. Singer Blaine Cook vocalizes like a mix between the victim’s dying last breath and the killer’s guttural throes as he’s doing the deed, just to overuse the analogy a bit more. Fabled grunge producer Jack Endino, to me, either makes these guys sound too clean, or sometimes dares to drown out Cook’s vocals (“The Corpse Walks”). He also produced the group’s previous effort, Grinning like an Undertaker, and coincidentally, two songs from that album make their way onto this CD, which makes me wonder if Undertaker is worth price of admission. There are some good points, here and there – the opener “No Hope for Relief” is decent, the cover of “Saturday Night Special” (here titled “Saturday Nite Special”) is attention-grabbing – but overall, the material, the delivery, production, just everything feels strangely muted to a large degree. Included is a live track (“Voices”) but close to half of it is devoted to inane stage banter. This is a sub-par disc from an otherwise interesting group.