JBNG AND DAVE MARTONE STRIP ALTERNATIVE ROCK TO ITS CLAUSTROPHOBIC CORE ON “MANY MOONS”

"Frontman Jaben John Groome enlists a Canadian guitar virtuoso to transform nineties angst into a suffocating, physical weight."

A jagged, downtuned guitar riff carves through the opening seconds of “Many Moons” before the rhythm section hammers it into submission. JBNG frontman Jaben John Groome made a shrewd calculation recruiting Canadian guitar veteran Dave Martone for this collision of post-grunge and alternative rock. Martone built his career playing alongside instrumental technicians, and he wields his instrument with a measured aggression that grounds the entire track. The guitarist hits the listener with thick, menacing compression, avoiding any risk of dated radio-rock pastiche. Groome shapes the distortion into a claustrophobic, deliberate weapon, turning nostalgic nineties angst into a precise physical weight.

Groome barks his way through the verses with a gravelly strain that sounds exhausting and physical. He scrapes his voice against the heavy instrumentation, delivering lines about crawling on the ceiling and breaking his back with a ragged, desperate urgency. He draws from the legacy of alternative metal vocalists who trade technical perfection for raw, bleeding-throat endurance. The frontman pushes his own performance back in the mix, forcing the listener to work to catch every syllable. This mixing choice forces the vocals to fight for space against Martone’s massive riffs, mirroring the thematic focus on suffocation and losing one’s mind.

Groome designs the chorus as a blunt-force pressure release valve. Martone stacks guitars into massive walls of sound while drummer Matt Koopman shifts into a pounding, relentless groove. Groome wails about going off the deep end, finding a massive hook hidden beneath the sludge. He avoids the typical loud-quiet-loud dynamic favored by his genre forebears, preferring to sustain a high-stress plateau from the first verse to the final chorus. Bassist Tim Charman drives a persistent throb beneath the chaos, maintaining the momentum even when the vocal melody threatens to drag the track into a doom-metal trudge.

In the final thirty seconds, the band cuts the massive rock arrangement to dead air, leaving behind a historical piece of NASA launch audio. A mission control voice announces main engine ignition and liftoff over fading static. Producers have dropped space-race samples into heavy music for decades, but Groome deploys his to punctuate themes of escapism and explosive departure. He uses the sterile archival recording to provide a sharp contrast to the sweat and grime of the past three minutes. This aesthetic pivot frames the aggressive performance as a desperate attempt to achieve escape velocity.

“Many Moons” demands attention through sheer force. The musicians offer a bruising reminder that heavy guitars and shredded vocal chords possess a brutal effectiveness when applied with precision. Groome and Martone strip away modern pop-rock gloss, leaving nothing but bone, grit, and feedback. They execute their vision with ruthless efficiency, proving that the best way to handle overwhelming anxiety is to drown it out with volume. The band leaves a mark after the final rocket engines fade.