1993 was a great year for music. One of those albums that made it great was Urge Overkill’s debut on Geffen Records, Saturation. So here we are. The 25th anniversary of this album. We decided to do a 20/20 hindsight review of these Overkill songs.
The opening guitar riff of Sister Havana makes the hair on my arms stand up at attention. This is pure 90’s vibe at it’s best. That’s the great thing about music. You can hear something you haven’t heard in a long time and as soon as the songs starts.. baboom.. you are back in a place you haven’t been for a while. For me, I felt like I was at a certain T.V. show coffee shop near New York’s Central Perk.
The guitar tone and crunch was much tighter than I remembered and that sweet sounding snare cuts right through the mix. Forgot how much I love this song and miss this sound.
Tequila Sundae is next up. It starts with what I can only describe as a badass guitar riff and hopping drum pattern. Singers Kato and Roeser provide some excellent layered vocals throughout the song.
The acoustic guitar on Positive Bleeding gives this album depth and makes certain it doesn’t get cast aside as an album that has twelve of the same sounding songs. A trend that unfortunately, seemed to happen with many albums of that era. Don’t get me wrong, it’s my favorite era but there are some stinkers. But I digress.
This album changes up quite a bit throughout. Go listen to Woman 2 Woman or the smoothness of the Rhodes Electric Piano on Crackbabies. Something you are not going to find on a lot of albums from that time period.
One of the fuzziest (and personal favorite) is The Stalker. This is 90’s rock/grunge/distortion at it’s best IMO. It’s a song that a fan of the band would certainly want to make a repeat visit on.
Erica Kane is almost like a “two songs in one” combo. I love the fast paced rhythm that makes me think of early Green Day. But right in the middle, the songs chills out and makes me think: Paul Westerberg. Both sounds are sorely missed in the music world.
The second to last track is Nite and Grey. A straight forward rocker that has that “single” quality about it. In the music environment of 1993-94, a nice fade out edit at around 3:18 and this feels like it could’ve been a big hit for the band.
The album ends with Heaven 90210. Here we get that tremendous guitar tone. We also get a story about a man that seems to be in a place that was meant to make someone else happy. And at the end of the day that happiness did not affect both people. It’s a beautifully written, somber song that ends the album perfectly.
At 24:10 on the last track we hear an announcement of “Dumb Song Take Nine”. Hidden tracks have sort of gone away in today’s digital format, as that surprise element doesn’t really work. But Urge took this opportunity to do something cool and weird. Go to the song and fast forward.
Another note about this album is that Nash Kato sang lead on the majority of the album and not King Roeser. Whereas Roeser generally sang most of the lead vocals on other Urge Overkill albums. Either way, it all seems to work well for Urge. Their sound is their sound and this was a nice album to go back and live through again.
-Tommy Marz
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