The Answer – Everyday Demons
Rock history is littered with underachievers, also-rans and would-be contenders but none quite so tragic as Terry Reid, a guitarist and singer of incredible talent who turned down lead singer spots in then-unknown bands Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, opting instead to pursue a solo career that never really got off the ground. His finest moment has to be Stay Me With Baby, a fragile whisper of a verse that leads to a canyon-sized chorus, rivalling anything Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were turning out at the time. With Reid now well into his 60s, he is still purveying his unique brand of delicately howled rock and roll around venues that do not do his ‘Superlungs’ monicker justice; yet it must be a comfort for him to know that his influence is alive and kicking within the shape of Cormac Neeson, lead singer of Irish four-piece The Answer.
Demon Eyes starts the album as it means to go on, borrowing HIM’s Buried Alive By Love lead riff as Neeson’s Reid-esque wail sails over the harmonic cacophony beneath. The band’s heavy metal stylings continue as Too Far Gone finds the band in head-banging heaven, the singer stuttering a high-octane tribute to Roger Daltrey, with the rest of the band clearly having a ball with crunching riffs that owe as much to latter-day bands such as Audioslave than to the vintage rockers like Black Sabbath that the band so clearly aim to emulate.
The lyrics rely heavily on rock and roll clichés, concerning good girls, bad girls and downright indecisive girls, (Why’d Ya Change Your Mind?) yet the visceral energy with which they are delivered protect them from criticism. It’s an interesting paradox that lines such as, “the wings of emotion” and, “hammer to my broken heart” can attain such credibility when hollered through the Marlborough-sponsored lungs of a tattooed heavy metaller, yet the same lyrics would be so easily mocked when sung by a pop star…as with jokes, it seems it’s the way you tell (scream) them.
As Aerosmith and Guns And Roses have shown with Crazy and Patience, every heavy metal band has at least one beautiful love song in them, proving that underneath all the hair and tattoos there is a Valentino just crooning to get out. An acoustic ballad certainly would have been a pleasant respite from the barrage of shredding and shrieking that permeates Everyday Demons; Comfort Zone is as close as they come to this, an epic paean to seizing the moment in the style of the stadium-sized pop-metallers Creed.
The whole album is a teenage rock fan’s fantasy; one can almost imagine the band listening to their own sound-check with ties wrapped around their heads, air-jamming on tennis rackets. The cross-harp solo that closes Evil Man is pure Team America, showing that The Answer certainly have a sense of humour about their music. Who knows, with the success that Everyday Demons should bring them, perhaps they could even help Terry Reid’s pension plans by offering him a support slot.
David Harfield
(http://www.roomthirteen.com/cd_reviews/9819/Answer__Everyday_Demons.html)
