Obsessed, The - Gilded Sorrow (2024)^{Release ID: 50099}

I've got to admit, I never tire of Wino's grizzled, whiskey-and-smokes vocals and his grooved-out guitar tones, so a new Obsessed album is always going to attract my interest. One of the few still-active metal musos who is actually older than me (he is 63 at the time of the album's release), Wino is unlikely to be springing too many surprises on his audience at this stage and, indeed, Gilded Sorrow is exactly what I would have expected from a new Obsessed album. This, of course, doesn't detract from whether it is any good and, for me as a long-time fan, it delivers all I could wish for from the band. The band is pretty much Wino & Co. now, drummer Brian Costantino being the only remaining member from previous album, 2017's Sacred, bassist Dave Sherman having passed away in 2022 and being replaced by the fairly unknown Chris Angleberger. Wino has also added a second guitarist, Sierra's Jason Taylor, to handle rhythm guitar duties.

This new band sound terrific, as tight as any iteration that has gone before, and with a top-knotch production job they sound better than ever. The groove-laden, fuzzed-up riffs are some of the best Wino has contributed to the band and the songs seem to stick in the memory better than ever before. Lyrically it's great to see Wino hasn't mellowed any with age and still sounds as pissed off and confrontational as ever, determined to take no shit from anyone, with a track like "It's Not OK" railing against music biz rip-off merchants and the anti-war sentiments of "Stoned Back to the Bomb Age" sounding particularly meaningful to the guy. The title track is another one worthy of note, it has a cool psychedelic edge despite it generally having a hulking, menacing atmosphere that gives it a nice twist.

I know it's not usually cool to say a band in their fifth decade of existence have produced one of their best albums, especially in the oft-times elitist world of metal, but even though this has the occasional lapse, Realize a Dream doesn't hit quite as hard as the rest, when it is good it is really good. It's reassuring to hear that a long-established artist can still deliver the goods even so late into their career.