ASG - “Scrappy’s Trip” Official Video

The excellent North Carolina band ASG released their fourth album, Blood Drive, back in May. 

Frontman Jason Shi’s muscular, dynamic voice drives the band’s downtuned riffing, and [Blood Drive] features a terrific abundance of both. Blood Drive is a heavy album, no question, but it’s primarily a catchy album, full of resin-sticky summertime metal. There’s not a bad song on the thing, and it surges from doom-y melancholy to sludge-y aggression, from psychedelia to rawk. It comes from a place not far from the ones that produced three of last year’s best metal albums, in fact: Baroness’s Yellow & Green, Torche’s Harmonicraft, and Pallbearer’s Sorrow & Extinction. That’s high praise, to be sure, but I think Blood Drive earns it.

Blood Drive was roundly well received, although it has yet to reach the level of prominence achieved by the aforementioned albums. That’s a shame, because listening to it today, the thing still sounds great — along with the metal acts referenced above, I can hear strains of Band Of Horses, Jane’s Addiction, Black Mountain, and Corrosion Of Conformity in these songs. There are a lot of bands trying to do this particular thing, and ASG do it better than almost all of them. Anyway, the band has released a video for Blood Drive track “Scrappy’s Trip.” It’s a pretty straightforward b&w performance clip, but it reminds me — and reminds me to remind you — to bump Blood Drive back into regular rotation this week. (Fun fact: In the video, guitarist Jonah Citty is wearing a shirt from the Brooklyn bar St. Vitus, which is owned by friends of mine.) It makes an ASG gig look like a pretty damned good time, too. On that note, the band is playing a free show on Dec. 4 at the Satellite in Los Angeles, and if you’re in LA, you should go. Cop tix here.