Drew Andrews Live @ The Whistlestop

Drew Andrews

Last Friday Night, Drew Andrews and company played the Whistle Stop Bar on the corner of 30th and Jupiter in South Park. Their unconventional instrument collection grabbed the audience’s attention and the music kept them there. Andrews’s band has an acoustic guitar, drums, bass, an electric guitar, a couple keyboards, a tonal percussion device of some sort (think xylophone), some violin bows for the percussion device and the electric guitar, an assortment of microphones and the receiver of a telephone. With 5 guys to play all that noise, you might expect a harmonic chaos but these fellas know how to put on a show.

Their melodies carve out a unique space in the land of music. If Sigur Ros released an album of lullabies in English, it might sound something like Drew Andrews. Nominated for “Best Album of the Year” at the San Diego Music Awards 2009, he and his band pave the way for innovative sounds in mature, restrained melodies. Andrews’s patient guitar picking, the drummer’s jazzy percussion, and keyboardist’s punctual harmonies culminate in the trance inducing tunes for which his album earned that nomination.

After the first atypically energetic tune, Andrews called up a couple members of John Meeks’s Group, the openers of the evening. With Meeks on Telephone and Matt Resovich on Violin they hooked in the crowd with a mellow number. The rest of the show went off without a hitch. Highlights included the unique vocal stylings through a telephone receiver, a bowed electric guitar, and a bowed note from the tiny xylophone (for lack of a more accurate name).

The show capped with an unplanned encore by the band in response to a bar full of folks not ready to call it a night. Drew Andrews and band improvised their way through one more song. In accordance with the themes of the evening, three band members played drums, while Andrews carried the Whistle Stop home.

Keep an ear out for Drew and his crew on their tour this winter with Tristeza kicking of at The Crepe Place on December 1st, 2009.