Mike Andrews
Hand on String
Elgin Park Recordings 

Having no previous knowledge of Mike Andrews I was quite surprised upon first listening to Hand on a String. The first track resembles a very new age-esque type sound and from there traverses across a vast landscape of musical geography. Mr. Andrews’ voice immediately reminds me of past musical greats Simon and Garfunkel, and the late Elliott Smith. While there are similarities amongst the three, Andrews’ voice possesses a unique dryness. It lacks any sort of dynamic quality, which blends smoothly with his music. The music’s uniqueness caught my attention more than anything else. Each song fits with the previous like a puzzle, but at the same time each song sounds entirely different. It’s almost each song is devoted to capturing the sounds of various different eras over the past fifty years.

If someone put a gun to my head and made me place Mike Andrews and the Hand on a String band into a specific genre, it would be folk-pop, if that is in fact a genre. As mentioned before, the first song holds many new age/experimental qualities, but the rest of the record sounds like a 30 year old folk singer entered the studio and realized he could create a lot of interesting sounds using different instruments and having the three back up singers who chant one word oh so angelically every few stanzas and snap their fingers and sway the rest of the time. Any way you look at this music you can’t deny that it’s something different and I’ve always known that different is good in some form or another.