Album Review: Third Time To Harm by OBN IIIs

The current landscape of garage rock is overrun by bands who find heroes in Sabbath and the Stooges, so it's rare in 2014 to find an artist that invokes the masters of ultra-mainstream radio rock from the late 1970s and early 1980s, a sub-genre that the comedian Marc Maron recently described as townie music. We're talking Van Halen, AC/DC, Skynyrd, Nugent, ZZ Top—bands that binged on masculinity and guitar heroics and made hit records that sounded really good when they were played loudly. They made songs that were ideal for pushing the speed limit, lifting weights, getting in bar fights, flirtin' with disaster, and for those moments where you ain't talkin' 'bout love.

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Forget the middle-fingers-in-triplicate cover art and the menacing album title, the five men of OBN IIIs are doing their part to save rock ‘n’ roll, and damned if they just about singlehandedly do it. Led by frontman Orville Bateman Neeley III, Third Time to Harm (their third LP, natch, and self-produced, to boot) finds the band mixing early-oughts garage rave-ups (think Electric Sweat-era Mooney Suzuki) with no-nonsense ‘70s hard rock, updating guitar heroics perfected by Radio Birdman’s Deniz Tek and Rob Younger’s post-Birdman bands (New Christs, New Race, etc). It’s a delirious, speaker-rattling, air guitar-windmilling, helluva rock record.

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OBN IIIs Third Time to Harm (Tic Tac Totally Records) "Awright ... One! Two! Three! GO!" So shouts OBN IIIs namesake Orville Bateman Neeley III, kicking these local Stooges' third LP into gear. Screaming guitars rampage through notably upgraded production, set against the frontman's lonesome polecat holler, warning he's got "No Time Left for the Blues." The best Detroit anthem he's written in a career defined by them, it sets the scene for the band's most exciting full-length.

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OBN IIIs — Third Time to Harm (Tic Tac Totally)OBN IIIs’ third full-length kicks off the way all unrepentantly gnarly garage-rock albums should — with a growled, two-sticks-in-the-air, “All right, one, two, three, four!” that is just a little bit too Southern to be Dee Dee-esque. “No Time for the Blues” rampages on from there, banging at punk speed but not shying away from shreddy, big-rock guitar solos. It’s like 1970s blues-rock amped up on crack, massive waves of guitar sound punched to bits by sheer velocity.OBN IIIs takes its name from the frontman’s initials — that’s Orville Bateman Neeley III — and its band members from Strange Boys, John Wesley Coleman, A Giant Dog and Bad Sports.

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