Mourning Widows

Mourning Widows is the debut by the band Nuno Bettencourt put together after Extreme. The order of events matters. Extreme ended in 1996; the following year he released the solo album Schizophonic on A&M, playing every instrument himself. It did not sell, he felt constrained, and he left A&M. Then, in 1998, he built the thing he had wanted from the start: a permanent band. His nephew Donovan Bettencourt played bass — the son of Nuno's brother Robert, a boy his uncle had been pushing toward music since not long after he was born. The name came from writing Nuno had seen on a church wall back in Portugal. And what matters most is where the record came out: Japan, on Polydor's Japanese division. It sold 45,000 copies in the first month. It was never widely released in the United States — neither album was, until Bruno Graffitti issued them there in 2004. The sound goes back toward the funky, guitar-driven rock of Extreme while carrying post-grunge and alternative textures with it.