Lehigh Valley Rocks, The best of 1984-1994

2007
Fever Rock

The Lehigh Valley area of Eastern Pennsylvania saw a number of musicians like Richie Kotzen, Jimmy Degrasso and Robert Mason get their start before moving on. There were also a lot of local bands during the time between the mid 1980's and the mid 1990's. The idea for this compilation originally came from two friends who were at first talking about just making a CD for friends that would include songs from hard rock and metal bands from the Lehigh Valley area. However the idea grew and turned into to being an official two disc set with 30 tracks from 27 bands. With that many songs there is a variety of musical styles and heaviness ranging from Omynus who have an AOR/hard rock sound like Journey up to Atom West who play speed metal with some crossover undertones. I thought that I had heard of a lot of bands and I have, but I had only heard of a few of these bands before including Teeze who appeared on Hit Parader's Wild Bunch, Dirty Blond who did a few albums and Destroyer who I think got some mentions in the metal magaines back in the day. Now some of these acts like Rock Haven sound like a raw bar band and I can tell why they didn't get a lot bigger. However, then you hear the smooth hard rock of Washed and Kraken, the groove of Jolly Roger and heavy involved riffing of Leviathen and you wonder why these bands didn't get further. At least I am getting to hear them now though. With the packaging we get a huge booklet where each band gets a half of a page that includes the list of band members and most entries include a band picture, information on when the band was around and even information on any band members who are still currently playing music. Overall it's a nicely constructed compilation with most of the songs being of good quality and it comes with great packaging. So I am glad this project came out so those of us who didn't hear these bands the first time around at least get to check them out now.

http://www.myspace.com/lehighvalleyrocks