An extraordinarily mature, passionate, poetic, and outstandingly powerful debut by the Manchester-based Galway-born singer-songwriter, whose soaring delivery has instant echoes of Jeff Buckley and lyrics that go above and beyond. As well as that mesmeric vocal control, there’s also a hint of the beautiful melancholy of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke’s fragile falsetto, Rufus Wainwright’s sustain and the freeflowing intimacy of Van Morrison about Ellis, but he very much comes across like an artist entering the musical world fully formed, his own man, and perfectly balanced with a band, alongside the usual instruments, decorated with saxophone, clarinet, cello, viola and button accordion. His lyrics, like his identity, are mysterious but instantly stand out from the opener Left Little Hope, which begins with a flutter of clarinet and acoustic guitar, and delicate vocals (“You were named like pastures / Fields with little stone walls / Little stone eyes”) then builds like some evolution into creativity, a beautiful waltzing chorus perhaps (“soon they come down / Wings and a word / Calling aloud for melody”) and a “Me and my brother, we've got / Space and got hands, got space and got hands / So maybe we'll start a band.” The more conventionally structured but no less warm and beautiful Pale Song, muses on the retrospection: “The past is like a sign / A sign it never talks / A sign you think you’ve lived / But it’s just stone with a little chalk.” Love Is, with a gentle piano accompaniment, begins with Wainwright comparison, then breaks into a rousing chorus (“Love is not the antidote to all your problems … Mapped by quotations and it’s not / What it seems, babe”) with quiet pauses. Nothing is predictable about Ellis. The quiet, simmering, and meanderingTo the Sandals, a previous single now in album form mixed by Big Thief producer Andrew Sarlo, is described as “reflections on a failing shotgun marriage in Cancún” with vivid lines such as: “From your grace / The sadist fails / Their red blade / A-rallying, tallying,” having a Van Morrison transcendent feel on the delivery of the line “All the feet going in and out and in and out and in and out.” When You Tie Your Hair Up is a glorious love filled with vivid, intimate facial detail. Ellis has a nod to his roots with the Irish jig accordion riff opening of Jaundice, but that fast, joyous sounding, catchy track is goes far beyond mere tradition with impenetrably strange lyrics that perhaps hark to mythology (“Sometimes a child's born without any face /At the breast of their own mother, right out of place”.) Mixing acoustic folk, piano pop, rock and more, this is a release of uncommonly, mesmeric, exquisite quality, Ellis’s voice hovering and soaring like a kestrel through songs of storm and calm that feel so perfect and familiar yet new, it’s easily among the releases of the year and one of the strongest debuts of the decade. Out on Black Butter Records/ AMF.
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