Artist: AUG
Album: Be Careful What You Wish For…
Genre: Hard Rock, Metal

Are you looking to party like it’s the ’80s again? Do you miss the heydays of bands like Ratt and Scorpions?

If you answered ‘yes’ to one or both of these questions, then chances are you’ll dig New Jersey’s AUG and their newest album, Be Careful What You Wish For… Chock full of prime hair metal riffage, big vocal deliveries, and plenty of material that’ll force you to make a choice between chugging your beer or banging your head (or you can try to do both simultaneously – I dare you), AUG are providing new fans and old with a rarity in this day and age: new old-school metal. This is the type of stuff that many folks my age were probably conceived to in the great 1980s.

AUG waste no time in the opener and title track to introduce you to what they’re all about; high energy, shred-tastic heavy music with an entirely fun vibe. Anthony “AUG” Agostine’s vocal approach will instantly bring Ozzy and similar vocalists to mind, but is that a bad thing? The answer is ‘no, no it’s not.’ AUG’s voice pairs perfectly with the band’s brand of jams and makes for a full wall of sound that will definitely take you back. If their original sound doesn’t do it, their cover of Toto’s “Africa” surely will.

Beyond that, this album has everything you likely love about heavy ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s music. It has the rad solos, dramatic balad-esque moments, the cowbell, the gang-vocal choruses, and even the occasional tongue-in-cheek lyrics to make you crack a smile. Basically, if you put this album on with friends entirely unfamiliar with AUG, they’d likely mistake it for a killer record they’ll feel they (or their parents) overlooked from a few decades past.

As there’s only 9 tracks, one of which is a cover, with another being an extended version of “Be Careful What You Wish For…,” it’s hard to really call this a complete album, but at 41 minutes in length, it really does feel like one. There may be nothing outright groundbreaking about what AUG have created here but I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a great time experiencing it. I was too young to fully experience the initial rumblings of this early style of rock, but the memories of my father and uncle spinning Black Sabbath, Bon Jovi, and Motley Crue records constantly as I grew up have never left me. For me, this album takes me back to that, and for that I am thankful.

Keep on rockin’, AUG. Creating what you love for yourselves is a hell of a thing. To pick up fans along the way is just icing on the cake.

SCORE: 8/10
Review written by Brian Lion — (Follow him on Twitter)

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Brian Leak

Editor-In-Chief. King of forgetting drinks in the freezer. Pop culture pack rat. X-Phile. LOST apologist.

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