C IS FOR CRUSHED “MY MACHINE”

BLOGGING A TO Z CHALLENGE APRIL 2011


Since the whole focus of this blog is CD reviews, I’m approaching the “A to Z” challenge by posting a review from a different artist for each letter of the alphabet.

In the interests of full disclosure, many of these are reviews that were previously posted on my blog on My Space, and while they are new posts to this blog, and new to most of you, they are not new work on my part, except for going and retrieving them from My Space and gathering cover images and alphabetizing them. I guess that’s work.

But that enabled me to get a head start, and since April is a pretty busy month for me, the head start allowed me to participate. Think of this as a way to catch up on some of the music you missed over the past few years, as I suspect that many of these artists you will not have heard of, although some, of course, are household names.

If reading any of these ramblings inspires you to go check out the artist’s music, I hope you’ll come back with comments on what you think after listening for yourself.

Crushed deliver an effective blend of melodic rock, metal, and Goth in their excellent debut effort. Produced by Mike Clink, whose impressive resume includes work with Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue, Megadeth, and UFO, the band delivers a slickly produced album hard enough for a metal fan, but melodic enough to enjoy considerable commercial radio air play. If radio stations in Arizona ever played new music anymore. Well, they do play country and Jordin Sparks. But the jury is still out on whether that counts as playing music.


An early high point is the single-worthy track "Hovering," that truly spotlights Clink's production knowledge, with lead singer Mark Lauer displaying vocals that range from a whisper to a growl, along with great guitar work. The album gets heavier with each new track as Crushed blend styles to cook up their own unique genre.

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/crushed