Though comprised of little more than an acoustic guitar, the occasional percussive accent, and a vocal that is capable of dispensing both heavenly harmonies and devastatingly menacing melodies almost simultaneously, Christine Hand’s Standing on the Shoulders has all the required hallmarks of a deeply emotional and compositionally multilayered album.
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Its foundation is purely organic; starting from the ground up and structuring everything off of a barebones melodicism that no one could replicate (mostly due to its aesthetical singularity, given there are no bells and whistles in this master mix), Christine Hand presents listeners with a black and white model for making magnificently transcendent folk-rock in Standing on the Shoulders without ever getting overindulgent in her appropriation of artistic features.
For example, where some of her contemporaries would have tackled the simplistic “Simple Life” with more oomph on the guitar, Hand chases a sonic equilibrium between her vocal and the strings that serve as a canvas atop which to paint a picture for the listener, demonstrating both efficiency and flexibility in ways that many of her closest rivals in the mainstream have come up short in recent years. 2022 has been a great year for singer/songwriter types, but of all the players who qualify as such that I’ve personally reviewed lately, Christine Hand is my current favorite.
As powerful as Hand’s singing is through all eleven of the songs on this record, her strings are responsible for telling us a story all their own in “Time to Embrace,” “Be Still,” the titular “Standing on the Shoulders,” and “In the Black and White.” Where words fail to capture the totality of her emotions in these songs, she utilizes the instrumentation as a means of finishing her point, and more prominently, lending agency to the words she does weave together in passionate pop poetry.
“Love Me True,” “Slow Dance” and “House of Bread” were all mixed to leave the natural grit alone in these tracks, and though some critics might see this as a production oversight, I think it was not only deliberate on the part of Hand but a smart move in the long run. By refusing to disrupt the unrefined integrity of her content in this disc, she exhibits all the more heart and creative fortitude than she already would have, and if the urgency she brings to this LP is something we can expect to hear out of all her upcoming work, this definitely won’t be the last time you see her name in the headlines.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/nz/album/standing-on-the-shoulders/1654316330
While I wasn’t familiar with Christine Hand’s complete body of work before getting a copy of Standing on the Shoulders from a colleague this past week, I’m planning on keeping an eye out for more content bearing her moniker in the months and years to come. Unlike many of her peers, who seem to be content reshaping the same redundantly surreal musical models over and over this season, Hand is keeping things straight and simple in her new album, and subsequently showing off more strength and potential as an artist for it.
Chadwick Easton