Artist: Mike Andrews
Album: Spilling a Rainbow
Bitrate: 227kbps avg
Quality: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.98.4 / -V0 / 44.100Khz
Label: Elgin Park
Genre: Indie
Size: 78.18 megs
PlayTime: 0h 45min 58sec total
Rip Date: 2012-12-03
Store Date: 2012-08-25
Track List:
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01. The Dentist 2:53
02. Here We Are 5:57
03. My Warming World 5:45
04. Bubbles in Space 2:35
05. Forever 3:53
06. Waiting for You to Wake 4:54
07. Breathing His Last 4:42
08. Low on Memory 4:53
09. Spilling a Rainbow 4:14
10. Music for Cell Division 6:12
Release Notes:
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Michael Andrews' Spilling a Rainbow starts out hallucinatorily, as a set of
billowing thoughts and soft echoing music. Even more strangely, that opening
cut, The Dentist, chronicles when he first heard he was going to be a dadàwhile
sitting in a dentist's chair and going numb. Heh! Ironic. From that point on,
though, a decad of well-crafted pop tunes arises, somewhat like Love's old
Forever Changes or The Zombie's Odyssey and Oracle, not a screaming crashing
song cycle but an exploration of country lanes and lives. More than once,
Andrews sounds like the Zombies' singer Colin Blunstone, a vocalist I've always
greatly favored (his take on Misty Roses remains stunning) through thick and
thin. Rainbow is a thoughtful panoply of realizations of what it means to
suddenly find yourself with responsibilities you'd formerly taken for granted
that would happen one day a long ways off, a wispy dream, something that occurs
on TVànow crashing through the front window.
Expect some William Lyall, Guggenheim Trio, and large remembrances of the
semi-symphonic crowd, even high period Brian Wilson cut with Graham Nash.
Harking back to Blunstone, though, I'd say even comparisons to Alan Parsons
would not be inapt, with prog shades as well (the delightful My Warming World),
at least not insofar as the balmy breezy softsiding Al so nicely put into all
his releases is concerned. Though I review damn near everything from Cannibal
Corpse to Iannis Xenakis, I will always, to my crit confrere's vexations, harbor
a soft spot for Parson's Project workàand have everything he ever put out.
Andrews fits that oeuvre very well indeedùand even 10CC's, as Bubbles in Space
sounds just like a lost cut from Original Soundtrack. Thus, don't expect
Spilling a Rainbow to be squarely in any of the comparatives I've cited but
instead a delicious blend of all of that and then of the gent's own
eccentricities. He's well known for radical remixes of materials from Joe
Jackson, Tears for Fears, and others, but this is distinctively his own and
heralds the kind of guy who a hell of a lot of songwriters are going to listen
to. Very closely.