Worth a Little Bit of Patience

Black Stone Cherry: Kentucky
Feature Track: Shakin' My Cage
Keep Listening: Hangman
Deep Cut: The Rambler
Even Deeper: I Am The Lion

If you are the type that revels in derivative post-grunge pop, Please make it Black Stone Cherry. A band that sounds kind of lame at first but constantly provides its own salvation through truly grunge tones and textures. Big guitar fills and solos.

By track three, the trauma of the last 10 years of shit-grunge starts to recede a little and I feel like I can hear this band for what they are. I have nothing left to give of this type of energy, but I would have played this in steady rotation during my teen years.

If one can forget the pathetic popular evolution of grunge, it is easy to imagine Black Stone Cherry the next obvious successor to the dark and dirty, sticky wood floors that birthed Soundgarden and AiC.

Kentucky combines a strange combination of authentic late-80's pre-grunge with a modern nearly-kitshe production. Literally, every song starts out with me rolling my eyes. However, almost every song wins over a small part of my hardened, cynical soul with a few perfectly placed riffs or legitimate grungy breaks.

I would say that the music is predominantly generic and would only appeal to a very specific demographic (I will not say which one). A lot of you might want to associate a band like this with Nickel Back, Creed or Matchbox 20. But I feel that there is some subtleties taking place that put Black Stone Cherry into a slightly different category. It is worth taking a quick look at this 15 track album.

If the song sounds like a shitty alt-pop song at the beginning, skip it. But if you like how the opening riff hits you, stay in for the whole song. You will find some definite gems on here, like Hangman!