BY CHARLOTTE ALEXANDER | Go Venue Magazine
Nearly 20 years into this century, the trails of today’s musical tracks can be traced back 25 and even 30 years ago as those influences blaze on into the future with the recent release of Every Mother’s Nightmare full-length 11-song album Grind, presented by HighVolMusic.
EMN offers a variety of static echoed vocals, including a couple of live recordings to demonstrate an interesting melodic mixed sack of rock options to the listener.
With an almost Southern Rock style fragrance of the late 1980s faintly spraying the background to accompany that badass decade’s reprising metal element, there’s a hint of pre-grunge early 1990’s microphone sounds tending to flirt at times with a brief alternative Oasis flavor meets a distant cousin of Black Crowes style in the new long awaited album. This lightly levied metal band oozes a palpable platter that delivers lead guitar riffs with qualified experience, without relying heavily on those basic drum beats to carry the songs.
It’s not a surprise considering this band’s Memphis regional roots stomped loudly on the music scene in the early 1990’s era as a featured staple on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball and previously sold out shows at venues dedicated to fans who demanded their high energy visits to a national audience.
Shadowing bass playing instincts so well that you almost forget it’s there, Troy Fleming gets it done to where you’d notice if it wasn’t because it comes so natural to the structure of their performance. This band just groups together well in their collaboration to compliment lead singer, Rick Ruhl, focusing on lyrics, and cements the purpose of forcing you to “hear” the nightmare in the distance as each track slithers its’ way into your cranium.
The second song “Snake” rocks that rhythm guitar right out of the gate and builds on the distorted vocals with some serious shredding taking place after the chorus “you’re just a snake after all, you shed me away.” Like a boa constrictor, it wraps tightly around your eardrum and grows on you, like a new skin. Surprised that it was a 3 minute and 40 second song, it seemed to be as fast as a snake with how it diminished from my speakers so quickly because I wanted to hear more of it and was a little disappointed when it ended so abruptly. What that means is, it moved this music lover to ‘play it again Sam.’
We’re treated with a guest performance of Saliva‘s guitarist Wayne Swimmy on “Snake” and it immediately became one of my favorites before I even acquired that information. Not to take away from the formative band members, this song just captivated my preferred musical appetite.
Travis “Gunner” Butler and John Guttery work well together in their guitar playing to bring home an established resinating exhibition that stands on not just effort, but is appealing in what appears to be an honest motivating desire to secure that old slogan “long live rock ‘n roll.”
Rock isn’t dead although you almost have to seriously go searching for it when festivals are presenting monster metal shows (which is great), with alternative sideshows and country, rap, hip hop and pop are taking over the radio stations. Enough Already. Some of us still wanna rock.
It’s a compliment to lead singer Ruhl, to almost compare his talent to Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher in the song ‘Days Are Through,’ and ‘Blown Away’ – this is where that mid 90s revelation appears, but displays a modern maturity today, with vital vocal backgrounds on Days that makes it radio worthy now and shouldn’t have to wait for marketing and exposure to reveal what it has to offer. There is room for rock to make some noise on the charts and it shouldn’t take long for the musical culture to notice that there are gifts here.
Another guest features the vocal talents of Jim Dandy on the song ‘Stand Up‘ and a companion video with the guitar blessings of Zach Myers of Shinedown on the first song ‘Loco Crazy’ on the album.
A little heavy on that static distorted sound, I’d be interested in hearing a little more stripped down version of EMN going back to garage days, but it’s cool that they present live versions along with their studio recordings in this release. I wouldn’t mind seeing them live as this listener is certain it’d be a rocking show.
Watch and listen ‘Blown Away’ below:
Rock music needs that push back into the mainstream and it is yearned for by the masses more so than the return of touring boy bands from our youth or a Spice Girls reunion that isn’t outlined on my marked list of the concert calendar. Absent for far too long, we hope more rockers like Every Mother’s Nightmare continues to dominate those stages, venues and airwaves to round out the first quarter of the century and fill the void to penetrate our eardrums with more desired quality rock.
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