AXE – Offering
Axe – Offering (1982, Atco Records; 2003, Wounded Bird Records)
Track Listing:
1. “Rock ‘N’ Roll Party in the Streets” – 3:29
2. “Video Inspiration” – 2:48
3. “Steal Another Fantasy” – 4:40
4. “Jennifer” – 3:56
5. “I Got the Fire” – 3:19
6. “Burn the City Down” – 4:45
7. “Now or Never” – 3:51
8. “Holdin’ On” – 2:54
9. “Silent Soldiers” – 6:00
Band:
Bobby Barth – Lead Vocals, Guitar
Mike Osborne – Guitar
Wayne Haner – Bass
Edgar Riley – Keyboards
Teddy Mueller – Drums
Produced by: Al Nalli
With a band name like Axe and an album cover like Offering‘s you’d expect something pretty heavy, but instead Axe is just a good hard rock/AOR band. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I knew what I was getting into anyway because I had heard “Rock ‘N’ Roll Party in the Streets” on Dee Snider’s House of Hair radio show while still in high school and it quickly became a favorite song of mine. Fast foward a few years and I was talking to a co-worker about Axe and he suggested I check out Offering. As luck would have it, about that time it was recently reissued by Wounded Bird Records so I snatched it up from CDUniverse.com for a good price.
Top to bottom, I really enjoy this album. It’s been about 3 or 4 years since I last listened to it, but I broke it out again on a whim and I’m digging it all over again. “Steal Another Fantasy” is a hard rock/AOR classic and I love the vocals on it and it reminds me of a few XYZ & Rainbow songs.
“Rock ‘N’ Roll Party in the Streets” would be the album’s highlight for me, but the band does a great job on covering Montrose’s “I Got the Fire” and it’s the most energetic song on the album.
Highlights: “Rock ‘N’ Roll Party in the Streets”, “Video Inspiration”, “Steal Another Fantasy”, “I Got the Fire”, “Burn the City Down”, “Silent Soldiers”
Posted on May 21, 2008, in Axe, Collection and tagged AOR, Axe, Hard Rock, Music, Rock, Rock & Roll, Rock 'N' Roll. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
I got into Axe in ’97 when they released FIVE. I remember I was at my favorite record store, 2 Guys Music (sadly gone now), and one of the clerks had FIVE going on the stereo. I swore it was a Journey record, a cool slice of AOR & Hard Rock.
I never picked up anything earlier from Axe because the CDs were always so hard to track down. There were 2 versions: Japanese pressing and a pressing on Axepertise Records which was a seriously high quality boot with tons of bonus tracks. The Axepertise issues used to go $100-150 back from ’97 to ’02 and then they mostly disappeared.
Wounded Bird does a good job of reissuing old albums but they don’t go the extra mile with bonus material, its just usually the same as the original except for the Wounded Bird logo. It’s still good to have the music available again.
Check out the Axe page at Heavy Harmonies for info & discussion on all the Axe releases
http://www.heavyharmonies.com/cgi-bin/band.cgi?BandNum=581
Steve
Heavy Metal Addiction
http://hardrockheavymetal.wordpress.com/