Bob Mosley - Bob Mosley (Reissue) (1972/2005)

Within a year of Moby Grape sadly crashing to a halt again after the release of the ill-fated reunion album 20 Granite Creek, Bob Mosley (who sang, played guitar, and wrote songs with the group) released his first solo album, and if 1972's Bob Mosley isn't a masterpiece on the order of Moby Grape's peerless debut album, it showed that Mosley's share of the talent that produced that great record was still in working order. Bob Mosley is a decidedly harder-rocking album than much of the Grape catalog, with Mosley and Ed Black loading up the songs with plenty of tough guitar work, but the melodies show the same blend of grace and power that marked his best work, and Mosley's pipes are in strong form here, with his blues-based vocals sounding potent and impassioned throughout (he also gets a great assist from the Memphis Horns, who add their punchy brass accents to several tracks). "Joker" and "Where Do the Birds Go" are fiery rockers, "Let the Music Play" is the sort of anthem Grape needed in the wake of their debut, and "Thanks" and "Gone Fishin'" are country-rock workouts that fit Mosley like a glove. Bob Mosley turned out to be Mosley's first and last solo album (except for an unreleased 1974 set that didn't see release until 1999), but if he fell victim to the same bad luck that haunted Moby Grape, he at least left behind a record that proved he had the talent to make it as a solo act if he'd been dealt a better hand. Mark Deming