3
We thought it was all over. When Ellis Jones drew a curtain around his career as Trust Fund, it felt like the end of a particularly bittersweet long-distance relationship. That was in 2018, and Ellis had just dropped Bringing the Backline, the quintessential Trust Fund album: full of wry humour, heartache, energetic punk-pop hooks and glittering moments of indie-folk prettiness (it also gave us Carson McCullers, which, in this household at least, will always be one of the greatest pop songs ever written). That Jones had chosen to leave on such a high seemed like a statement of finality, an exclamation mark at the terminus of a convoluted, messy, beautiful sentence.
But then, in 2022, Jones released the first of five beautiful individual tracks, later collected as It Is What It Is (2023), and we were forced to reinterpret that final statement as a question. Would those five songs be the last dewdrops shaken off a winter coat before it’s packed away and forgotten about? or the beginning of something like a new era?
Well, the swift appearance of Has It Been A While? gives you a pretty definitive answer, while posing a few more questions of its own. It’s a Trust Fund album: the same but different. Jones’ trademark vocals – delicate, leaning into the fey side of indie-pop cuteness – are more apparent than ever, and the melodies are typically gorgeous. He has always possessed the ability to pluck hooks out of the air like a cat catching wasps, and Has It Been a While? is littered with them. The main change is in the album’s bigger picture: those five songs from the last couple of years hinted at a folkier Trust Fund, a move away from the sometimes brash guitar-pop and scratchy DIY indie that we were used to into gentler territory. Has It Been A While? fully embraces that switch. Jones’ biggest influence here is Nick Drake, and it shows.
And Jones has changed: half a decade spent in academic pursuit has given his songwriting a more thoughtful, philosophical dimension. Opening track Leaving the Party Early channels the warm acoustic guitar and subtle strings of Drake and other classic folkies like Roy Harper while namechecking Spinoza and Nietszche. The melody is a gentle, bubbling thing that would give early Belle and Sebastian a run for their money, and Jones’ voice climbs up and down the intricate guitar frameworks with ease. The Mirror, a sweet duet with Celia MacDougall, plunges even further into folky territory: it’s like the Moldy Peaches if they’d ditched the toilet humour and embraced Simon and Garfunkel. MacDougall reappears on the beautiful closer One Calendar Year, a song which is the bottled essence of Trust Fund, full of regret and remembering and sadness and joy, peopled with real characters who are just hazy enough that they could also be the real characters from our own lives.
The broader lyrical concerns remain Trust Fund to the core: childhood and memory and a love of music imbue the spirit of Curtis; A Wooden Medal is a sideways look at fidelity, anxiety and the pressure to have children delivered with the simplicity and sincerity of Marine Girls or Young Marble Giants. The brief, string-swelling This Life is a wistful autofiction. In the Air details a holiday romance: the mess and the uncertainty as much as the sun and the spark. New University cleverly juxtaposes the degradation of the built environment with the maturation of a single human life: the political and the personal proving inseparable.
This will be one of those albums you turn to in late summer or early autumn as the light begins to fade: if there is any tension here, it is between restless nostalgia and the contented observation of time passing in the present moment. The mood is enhanced by producer Joe McKenzie Todd, who brings a sound like honey and teak to Jones’ guitar, and by Maria Grig’s string arrangements, which grace many of these songs, including the unbearably pretty chamber-pastoral Until Now, an ode to moderate daytime drinking and living in the moment. Dave Westley’s trumpet adorns I Look For Him, a typical Jones character study which is both tender and tinged with bitterness. A smoky jazziness infuses the title track, which crams years of personal history into two sweet minutes.
Has It Been A While? drifts by, a thirty-five-minute reverie, gauzy and dreamy and illuminated from within. But for all its apparent wispiness, Jones’ intelligence and depth of thought anchor it to some very real concerns. He manages to combine an almost Proustian preoccupation with memory and the intangibility of the past with the admirably Spinozan notion that we should value our lives as they are lived. And that’s an important lesson for all of us because, well, who knows when we might get another Trust Fund album?
Has It Been A While? (1st November 2024) Tapete Records
Order: https://orcd.co/trustfund
Trust Fund UK Tour
Friday November 8th – Upper Chapel – Sheffield*
Saturday November 9th – Ivy House – London*
*Album launch shows with string quartet accompaniment
Thursday 14th November – Henrykk – Manchester
Friday 15th November – Florence Park Community Centre – Oxford
Sunday 17th November – Elysium – Swansea
Monday 18th November – The Moon – Cardiff
Tuesday 19th November – The Exchange – Bristol
Thursday 21st November – Cumberland Arms – Newcastle
Friday 22nd November – Old Hairdressers – Glasgow
Saturday 23rd November – Quarry – Liverpool
Sunday 24th November – Micklegate Social – York
Tickets available at www.trustfund.fun
