Genre: Folk

Guitar work such as Mike Seed’s will be enjoyed by two audiences, those enjoying the original folk music and further those listening to the dynamically progressive acoustic finger work with its heart firmly embedded in American style of modern folk finger-style imbued with melodies of raw and introspective melancholy. But it is not just an intimacy of instrument as displayed on ‘A Boy Mistaken for a Crow’ that makes this distinctive, as for example, Devendra Banhart’s first album on Young God Records, as there is an honest song-craftsmanship in each of the unique and poetic fables Mike Seed has captured and while not all gems, with twenty tracks of acoustic guitar and vocals there is plenty of room for receptive emotive range.

The song styles are broad in their palette of meter, tension, and release, with Mike Seed’s own vocal style varying as naturally as his guitar work with each track. From songs of minor arpeggio’s and spoken word launching into sonorous lines before dropping back into lonely descriptive passages to fingers unleashing train like rhythms with thumb and flailing fingers in charge of the locomotion as they bend around corners where their sound is muffled by mountains, dynamics a strong staple throughout all of ‘A Boy Mistaken for a Crow’. More accessible tracks of gossamer stings in brushed rhythms do surface but as mentioned, the vast array of tracks leaves something for everyone. Several tracks of autoharp dirges show an absence of the guitar, giving Mike Seed voice to experiment in percussive-less song and even solo.

While the recording is raw, replete with non-faded starts to tracks, cut outs, some clipping errors, you never lose the sense that you are closer to the recording room than with most fingerstyle folk or any modern recording studio work. Most of the tracks appear to have been recording in noticeably different sessions on a few tracks yet even this does not dismiss the aforementioned intimacy. For neo-folk aficionados in the European school of medieval inspired folk ‘A Boy Mistaken for a Crow’ may be a stretch if you are not familiar with American folk, whose rhythmic style and dynamics are far more relaxed and based less on classically trained familiarity.

The album, as of others on the Anticlock label, is modest in its presentation, a single two page insert that along with the CDR disc – inset in non-jewel case for non-dual sided tray inset, also white and sparse in design.