There are certain immutable laws in the world — the seasons will change, the sun will rise and set and Bobaflex will rock your ass clean off.
The West Virginia quintet with a name that sounds like a Star Wars bounty hunter’s home gym is just a couple of years away from its 20th anniversary and shows no signs of slowing down, if their seventh and latest album, last year’s Anything That Moves, is any indication. The band’s third release on its own BFX label — following the Chemical Valley EP and 2013’s compelling Charlatan’s Web — is a showcase for the band’s visceral passion and dynamic range, shifting from full-frontal Metal/Hard Rock to heartfelt power balladry (“Turn Me On”) in a double-clutched drumbeat. There’s plenty of arrested development juvenilia — “Objectified,” “Mama (Don’t Take My Drugs Away)” — and sidelong glances toward more mature subject matter (“Lose Control,” “Start a War”), but it’s all set to a crushing Rock soundtrack that Bobaflex has been perfecting over the past two decades.
If hard work automatically translated to success, the members of Bobaflex would have been swimming in the Pam Anderson-shaped pools behind their mansions a decade ago. The band was essentially formed by vocalists/guitarists/brothers Shaun and Marty McCoy — distant relatives of the clan that feuded with the Hatfields in the late 19th century — during Marty’s tenure as a Marshall University student. Starting as a fundamentally Metal outfit, Bobaflex hit the road with a vengeance, accepting every opening slot and festival gig that came along and building its fervent fan base from the ground up.
After five years of relentless roadwork, Bobaflex dropped its debut, 2003’s Primitive Epic, on the Eclipse label, which released the band to sign with TVT for 2005’s Apologize for Nothing and 2007’s Tales from Dirt Town. But TVT filed for bankruptcy, and the resulting legal tangles derailed Bobaflex for a long stretch; the band lost the rights to its name and songs, but ultimately regained them.
When legalities were settled, Bobaflex released the Chemical Valley EP in 2010, and then partnered with Megaforce Records for 2011’s Hell in My Heart, turning BFX into an imprint; the band returned to independent status with Charlatan’s Web. Although Bobaflex has flirted with commercial success — two of its big radio hits were covers of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” — Anything That Moves was the band’s first major seller, cracking the Top 20 of Billboard’s Heatseekers chart.
With these guys, there’s no easier math on the planet: Hard work + Hard Rock = Bobaflex.
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This article appears in Apr 6-13, 2016.
