ASG frontman Jason Shi's voice is the most distinctive part of his North Carolina band's sludgy psychedelia and poppy Southern heavy rock. Which isn't a knock: They're a good band, but it's that voice that adds the "poppy" to the previous description. It also makes me think more about rock radio than metal. Shi drives home the hooks with an upper register semi-falsetto that's melodic when it needs to be, with an occasional gruffness. It can bring to mind 90s alternative bands (Jane's Addiction with a Southern twang) as well as a skate rock group you caught on a Powell-Peralta video during the early part of same decade (maybe, in part, because Shi resembles Tony Hawk). When he really puts his back into a note, it sounds like he's levitating.
The band's third LP, 2008's Win Us Over, hit me a little after it was released and then became a regular part of my rotation. Their new fourth album, Blood Drive, their first for Relapse, made sense on first listen. The 12-song collection was produced by Grammy-winning engineer Matt Hyde, who's worked with ASG previously. He's also produced albums for Monster Magnet, Sublime, No Doubt, Slayer, Porno for Pyros, and Sum 41, and he knows how to get the big, bright sounds that work best with this band. The quartet aren't afraid of grooves. They don't cower from fist-pumping anthems. It's sunny music that should makes fans of Torche and Queens of the Stone Age perk up their ears.
It's not all Shi: ASG know how to write memorable riffs and hooks that really do stick with you. Though they just go by ASG these days, the initials were originally short for All Systems Go, a sentiment that's likely more suited to these guys than whomever sued them way back when and claimed the name for themselves: They pause here and there to insert an acoustic passage, a blues riff, some deep-voiced Americana, or a patch of echoing psych, but for the most part, ASG remain revved up.
The lyrics don't match the usually upbeat sound, and that disconnect helps make the band even more interesting. On Blood Drive, Shi's words often focus on the apocalypse and the sky. We get "Earthwalk"'s "All night earth cries beautiful sounds," "Hawkeye"'s "Lights out we ride/ Tearing holes in a sunken sky," "Stargazin"'s "Born to ride/ Helplessly into a burning sky," and "Mourning of the Earth"'s "Roman candles in the sky." There's also self-mutilation ("I bled for you, come now and bleed for me, too/ Then stitch me up again"), burial ("Spread my remains close by where the weeping willow stood/ I'll be born again"), and plenty of general pain and failure. But it's not melancholic or dour. It's the restlessness of a song like "Thunder Road". It's the end of the world in Jane's Addiction's "Stop". This is angst you can sing along to while drinking beers in the backyard with your friends.
There's also a punk attitude here. On the radio-hit-in-another-universe title-track, Shi shouts: "Got a long list of foes and a shorter list of friends." You get the feeling that this isn't entirely true-- ASG are a likable band who've been around a long time-- but it does feel right in this music, where the emotion is a large part of the appeal. And on "Blues for Bama", he sings "comes as you were" in a lower, scruffier register before singing it again closer to his usual tone. It's a nice nod to Nirvana, and also entirely fitting: Like Nirvana, this is a rock band that can make us dance to songs about "a lifetime of shit and disfigurement."
