A mammoth comeback with mammoth expectations. Yet those were even exceeded with Corrosion Of Conformity’s No Cross No Crown. Featuring the return the bassist Pepper Keenan, COC takes back their kingdom with their trademark southern, groovy sounds matched with tremendous songwriting to boot. It feels good to hear Pepper’s distinctive vocals and keeps us coming back for more. No Cross No Crown takes the #6 spot of our BravePicks.

As Mike Dean told BraveWords in a feature interview, “It’s significant to us because it’s the first time in probably twelve years or so that we’ve had both Reed Mullin and Pepper Keenan playing in the band with us on a new recording. The last one we did with Pepper was In The Arms Of God, and I was feeling creatively like we were taking it to some new places and we were really happy with it. But Reed wasn’t available, so we had Stanton Moore, who apparently if you look at drum magazines, he would be on the front of them - he plays in a New Orleans/jazz/funk thing called Galactic. That was creatively very cool, and we wanted to continue that, but Pepper went back to Down, and we gave it a rest for a while. Then we brought it back as a three-piece, and that was awesome. But sometimes you’re missing that magic that Deliverance was - that type of format. We got back with Pepper and were planning on getting to work making some music, and we got roped into maybe a hundred more shows than we planned to do - because people were asking. So we finally got around to it last year, and it ended up not being entirely what we expected. We were thinking, ‘We’ll continue on in the vein of In The Arms Of God, and some of that Deliverance type magic would occur.’ But I feel we came up with a different animal - a little more aggressive, a little more relentless. But in a creative way - not in a knuckle-dragging kind of way. Having the luxury of it being a couple of months completed here, I actually have perspective of it, and can listen to and go, ‘This is potentially ground-breaking for us.’ I’m really happy with it.”