Bobaflex

What remains for Point Pleasant, West Virginia rap-metal outfit Bobaflex now that rap-metal is dead and buried? New life as an entirely competent and surprisingly charming and original hard-rock combo, apparently. Where Bobaflex set themselves apart from and above many of their hard-rockin’ peers is in their vocal melodies and harmonies: the lyrics are traded off between each of their five singers, adding an odd choral quality to the proceedings. If anything of their rap-metal roots survives on Apologize for Nothing, it’s in this Jurassic 5-ing of otherwise straight-up hard-rock stompers, and in the Onyx-like delivery of "Turn The Heat Up” ("Ill like a BIRTH DEFECT!”). Things get really heavy — thematically, that is — on "Bullseye,” when Bobaflex, in their collective lyric, take head-on the veneration of the gilded thug that plagues contemporary popular youth culture: "MTV putting killers on the screen/children dance to a song where murder is the theme . . . Never blame the labels or the artists/heavens no no no!” Add to this that guitarists/vocalists Shaun and Marty McCoy are direct descendants of the McCoys who, in their infamous feud with the Hatfield clan, nearly caused a war between Kentucky and West Virginia in the 1880s, and what’s not to love?