"Let it first and foremost be known that attempting to describe the musical genre of Mike Cellemme's debut, self-produced and recorded funded - albeit great quality for such recording conditions - album, The Quincy Adams LP, is like attempting to describe Einstein's general and special theories of relativity to a toddler that just mastered the ability to mumble the word "Mommy"; it just cannot happen.
Mike's invitingly beautiful melodies combine many, many aspects of various musical styles, varying almost song-to-song. The opening track, "The Terrible Storm", starts with highly distorted and blurry-sounding guitar chords and soon drifts easily into a simple acoustic guitar rhythm. Soon thereafter, the hypnotic repetitions of a drum-machine begin their audibly surprising beats. Mike's soothing, clean, and all-around delightfully pure voice compared to most of today's immitation vocals soon enters the musical myriad and instantly seems to add an indescribable amount of composure to the song just before you half expect the wailing of rabid gorillas to sound. Ah, but the song isn't done just yet! After a brief instrumental interlude and a couple of verses, Mike bursts into speedy rap-like vocals heavily styled after slam poetry - Mike's original source for most, if not all, lyrics. The song ends. You crave more.
Most of Mike's songs are written in similar fashions, yet with different musical styles; they all seem like experiemental songs on their own, blending various styles, yet these blended styles vary from song to song, and the entire album seems to blend together seamlessly and beautifully. A very evident characteristic, and perhaps the main reason I adore his music so much, in all of the songs (at least, the ones containing lyrics; many of the songs are elegant classical guitar instrumentals) there is a defined sense that a story is being told. Whether the story is that of "Last Arrow"s, where a sparrow hunter is turned vegan by the enlightening and philosophical words of an old traveler, or "Loring Hall"s story of a lonely college campus security guard attempting to lend his security advantages to the students in exchange of letting him drink and party with them, there is always a clear story being told.
Much like many innovating and experimental musicians, much of the energy of the songs does not necessarily convert well into a 4.5" CD or a 40-odd megabyte folder of MP3s. Mike's stunning live shows, so I am told by a Rhode Island friend of mine (Mike's hometown where is assumes a sort of local-legend status) are so energetic to the point of almost being out-of-body; he improvs nearly half of every song by combining two similar songs, continuing a song minutes past its album length, or even adding entire versus on-the-spot by incorporating his slam poetry-styled lyrics into any one of his songs and still managing to make it sound so beautiful. His genuine, sincere, and all-around loving personality often makes appearances in his live shows, a fact that unfortunatly cannot translate into a recorded form. Perhaps a live album is in tow? Oh, God; woulds't thou bless me so?"
--Review from fallpoetaster
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