Mother's Finest - Another Mother Further (1977 Reissue) (1989)

Back in the '70s, when your band's first album was a commercial stiff and your second started off with a cover instead of an original composition, chances were your parent record company had just about lost faith in your ability to crank out a hit. And as easy as it is to make such generalized assumptions a few decades after the fact, this certainly felt like the dilemma facing Southern funk-rockers Mother's Finest upon the release of their sophomore album, Another Mother Further, in 1977. Along with the aforesaid righteously rock-ified cover of the Miracles' Motown standard "Mickey's Monkey" and a faithful "Burning Love" in tribute to the King on this, the year of his passing, Another Mother Further featured a tellingly restrained production that suggested marketing gremlins had by then set up shop inside the studio, bent on commercializing Mother's Finest's sound. Not even they could forestall the band from ripping up the joint with several inspired numbers, however, and even though Glenn Murdock's feisty "Piece of the Rock" didn't fare all that well as the album's first single, mad-funky mid-paced groovers like "Baby Love" (which had a better showing at number 58) and, to a lesser degree, "Truth'll Set You Free" saw his co-lead vocalist and wife, Joyce "Baby Jean" Kennedy, almost burning down the vocal booth. Sadly, the soft rock swing of "Thank You for Your Love" was more suited to the nearest Holiday Inn lounge than the concert stage; the sugary proto-disco of "Dis Go Dis Way, Dis Go Dat Way" was an obvious, inferior copy of the Commodores' "Machine Gun"; and the totally forgettable "Hard Rock Lover" was hardly the sort of end piece to send listeners home with at the album's conclusion. Such mixed rewards would not bode well for Mother's Finest's short-term career health (nor the long term, come to think of it), as neither their label nor consumers appeared capable of coping with so much sonic diversity, and the situation would only become exacerbated by 1978's ensuing Mother Factor LP.