Blastitude 27 - February 2009

I played this for a buddy of mine who, like me, was living high out on the Great Plains back in the 1990s, and he kept saying how "Kansas City" this album sounded, meaning Germbox, Season to Risk, bands like that. I realize that not everyone reading this will be familiar with this distinctive regional strain of 1990s post-hardcore, and I highly doubt the guys in this band RSO are either, I mean they're from Clifton, New Jersey and they're recording almost two decades later... but the point remains that they aren't so much doing something new as they are pushing hard on something that was new in its time and still has a lot of shelf life in it. And, they expand on it for the 2000s by dragging all the songs out into the 7 to 9 to like 14 minute range, a very solid hand that contains the improbable wild card of electronically treated saxophone solos... LP comes with a CD that has bonus tracks.