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Album Details

• Artist: Sacred 13
• Album: Jagged Regrets
• Label: indie
• Year of Release: 2010
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: mark_morton on 2010-09-14

Kicking off with an ethereal, heavily reverberated, doomsaying introduction, JAGGED REGRETS explodes into a gritty, fist-to-face moshable rhythm. And it becomes immediately apparent that all that stands between Sacred 13 and greatness is a virile vocalist. Thankfully, the listener is not disappointed, as the voice that resonates through the speakers is a whiskey-baked, sore-throated, Southern-styled snarl that completes a package, making you want to smash a bottle over a random bar patron's head and kick their ass just because they're there.

To pass Sacred 13 off as a mere bar band would be a misnomer, as there is impassioned conviction behind those piledriving punches. The band aligns itself in a genre of incredibly gifted bands that play a brand of heavy rock that is highly accessible yet riding the fringes enough to not be widely acknowledged and embraced by the masses - bands like Brand New Sin, Black Water Rising, Rhino Bucket, and the anomaly, Black Label Society. It is music that is easily-relatable to the Everyman, and if blue-collar workers weren't so hellbent on Country music, they should be blasting this from their pick-ups.

Accessiblity aside, the riffing and iron-chunked construction is heavy enough to fall within the realm of metal, a characteristic more deserving of Sacred 13 than bands like modern-day Metallica or whatever band is calling itself a variation of a "core" this week. The riffs are simple, but the performance is filled with so much piss and vinegar that the band could easily go toe-to-toe with Black Label Society any day of the week.

On the one hand, because they almost never get popular, one begins to wonder why bands like this exist. However, after experiencing the raw energy of Sacred 13, you are glad they do.

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