Folkwax (E-Zine)

by Evert Wilbrink

ROMI MAYES: “ACHING IN YER BONES”

Romi Mayes is one of the hardest working Canadian artists and her hard work is about to pay off. “Aching In Your Bones” is her second collaboration with producer Gurf Morlix, who’s been responsible for such gems like Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Snake Farm”, Mary Gauthier’s “Mercy Now” , Slaid Cleaves’ “Wishbones”, the first few Lucinda Williams albums and a couple of brilliant but far underrated Gurf Morlix albums like “Diamonds To Dust”. Romi is a great entertainer, who offers her audiences a range of blues to folk, and rockers to ballads. Her writing gets better and better and “Aching In Yer Bones” includes a couple of outstanding tunes. I especially love her duet with Gurf in “Mercy On Me”: headlights shining down a dead end street, but you’re in too deep… and the title song is brilliant, too. Creepy guitar licks and still full of warmth. I spent forty hours coming down that Greyhound bus alone, forty hours ain't too long when you don;t have a home, forty hours longing for a place to call your own, it’s forty hours aching in your bones…. Some of the other songs are just entertaining, but still force you to listen, if only like in “Hard Road” because of her sexy, magnetic voice: turn off the radio, come lie with me…