Joe Mercer – The Storm Over You (Single Review)

In today’s review, we shall chronicle the newest release of a veteran of a location-specific genre. This is Joe Mercer, also known as J. Mercer. He describes himself as a musical virtuoso whose roots trace back to the heart of Georgia.

His love for music led him to begin his career as a studio engineer, during which he learned how to chose the right equipment to complement the right music. He also learned how to mix and layer music tracks to give a better finished product. He has also worked as a songwriter since the 2000s, and strongly infers that his early career propelled him to dive deeper in music.

His newest release, titled ‘The Storm Over You’ is currently out on various platforms.

The song definitely infuses licks of blues, jazz and rhythm and blues mixed into one. It generally has a downtempo feel, matching the theme of the track. J’s vocals oscillate between slightly off-putting and a warm croon.

I just generally think that the levels of the vocals are not equalised properly to match the intensity of the backing track, which has lots of character in the beginning but has too much of a ‘presence’ afterwards, masking the lyrical flow.

I don’t think the song is conceptually bad, but if the instrumental is somewhat recursive and has the same loop, you have to distract the audience with sublime mastering, and even the ‘backing vocals’ recounting the words ‘over you’ seem to have a muskiness to it. I think if this song were mastered right, it would be absolutely stunning.

I hope the artist does not take offence at my comments; rather, I really want his track to shine. It’s just that the mastering issues do generally retract me from enjoying the track, as an outsider. If he wants to engage more audiences, perhaps just tweak the mastering.

SCORE/Mediocre to Good: The Storm Over You is a song that has a lot of promising potential but the mismatch between the vocal tracks and the timbre of the instrumental really prevented me from enjoying this track. I hope these issues are rectified in grace, and I’m not saying this out of spite, I just think this track needs to be honoured properly.

[We rank singles, EPs, and albums on a scale of Poor, Mediocre, Good, Excellent, and Outstanding]

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