Signed by Capitol Records on a wave of goodwill toward heavy rock following the gang buster success story that was Grand Funk Railroad, the members of Bang were hastily ushered into the nearest studio while the ink on their contract was still drying and essentially asked to "show us what you got" by their new backers. What they had, as exemplified by memorable opening gambit, "Lions, Christians," was a hard rock style that tempered the sheer bombastic doom and gloom of Black Sabbath with a less oppressive, blues-reliant sound redolent of most every other proto-metal band out there at the time (think Toe Fat, May Blitz, Dust, etc.), to be quite honest, and therefore lacking in the uncontrolled danger of a Blue Cheer or Sir Lord Baltimore. In fact, such outright savagery was only momentarily threatened here on a few subsequent tracks, including the biting staccatos of "Come with Me" and Neanderthal plod of "Future Shock," but by the arrival of lead single "Questions" and its undeniably infectious sibling "Redman," some measure of civility had largely been restored. And, sprinkled amidst these angrier moments lay a few curious stylistic diversions like the gentle Arthurian fingerpicking of "Last Will and Testament" and the hippie-dippy sentiments of "Our Home," each of which respectively veered into art rock and the sort of post-flower power whimsy that Altamont should have categorically nailed to a tree a few years earlier (and which had dominated Bang's ambitious but flawed first effort, Death of a Country, which was shelved upon delivery). Having thus heard Bang's best shot (if you catch our meaning) and then watched "Questions" flounder on the charts, the bean-counting suits at Capitol Records apparently and perhaps prematurely deemed their new charges to be anything but the perfect marriage of Sabbath and Grand Funk they were hoping for. The naive musicians in Bang were barely given another chance to build upon this solid debut's abundant promise, and, as would be shown by pair of flawed and confused follow-up albums, their career was to be thrown into a tailspin before hardly getting off the ground. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia

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