Nick Evans Mowery – Midnight Faces
Tangent Boy Productions – 2024
10 tracks; 35 minutes
Nick Evans Mowery is a singer/songwriter from Nashville who often manages to place his songs in TV shows and movies. A prolific artist, Midnight Faces is his twentieth album on which he wrote all the songs and sings and plays every instrument you hear.
The title track is a Stones-style rocker with insistent piano and makes a good opener. Nick also plays a solo that sounds very much like Keith Richards on “Ole Tin Lizzie”, a song about an old car, more of a mid-paced rocker with a very simple drum pattern, not altogether surprising when you discover that all the drums are programmed.
Shifting styles, Nick adds a country tinge to “A Guilty Heart That’s Trying” and some rockabilly rhythm guitar to “Carolina Blue”. “Shirley Jean” is an old-fashioned acoustic number about an elderly lady reflecting on her life and, in contrast, “Brainworld” is a guitar-led rocker with jagged rhythms. The gentle acoustic Americana song “Let Him See You Smile” has touching lyrics about despair: “…like the pain deep in her soul, in its own little room” while “Southern Fried Funk” does pretty well what the title suggests.
“Woman Child” describes a young girl who looks far older than she really is, with her black lipstick and heavy tattoos and Nick closes this short album with a haunting ballad in which the protagonist has lost his girl and removed her picture from the wall, leaving a “Perfect White Square” on the wall.
There is no use of the word “blues” in this review because, in essence, there is no blues element here. Nick covers rock, country and ballads and is clearly a talented musician.
