Speck was one of those bands that was easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention. They released two albums for Bulletproof/Gray Dot Records in the late 90s. That decade produced a plethora of alternative rock bands. In fact, there were so many that at times it was difficult to keep up, and even harder to wade through them in order to find the gems among the mediocre. Speck, sadly, didn’t make a huge splash like their counterparts in Plankeye, Grammatrain, The Prayer Chain, Poor Old Lu, and the like.
So when I acquired a copy of their debut album recently in a trade (I had owned it in the past, but it somehow escaped my collection), I was pleasantly surprised at how solid it is. While there’s nothing all that new or incredibly groundbreaking, this is a solid slab of straight up alternative rock that made me want to hit that repeat button. There are slight touches of various 90s subgenres like pop-punk, power pop and grunge, but overall, it’s just 90s alternative. This is a really fun album with Christocentric lyrics that never preach too hard.
Opening track “Mercy” is a banger, in which the narrator asks the Lord for mercy not only to surround his own life but to be a major characteristic of it. The song comes from the 1997 eponymous debut. I don’t know anything about the band members or where they were from, so if you have more information for us, drop it in the comments.
