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John Patrick Elliott is a songwriter whose band, The Little Unsaid, make some of the most soul-searching, brutally self-aware music around, so perhaps it shouldn’t be much of a shock to discover that his first solo album, My Role in the Show, is profoundly, intensely personal. Elliott’s great strength as a songwriter – or one of his great strengths, as he has many – is his ability to examine open psychological wounds with precision, clarity and honesty, and in a solo setting, these examinations are brought into even sharper focus.
Elliott has been around for a decade and a half now, recording and releasing in various different ways, and some of those many Little Unsaid albums have been solo albums in all but name. But ditching the Little Unsaid moniker seems to have had a sharpening effect on his output: it’s obvious from very early on that My Role in the Show was born out of heightened and conflicting emotional states. Ceremony, the first track, introduces an icy, urban setting perfectly described by Elliott’s high, clear singing and a brittle rhythm section. The delicate sound was achieved by playing a drum kit with pencils, and the effect is so convincing that it almost sounds artificial. There is a hint of Portishead’s cold, cinematic trip-hop in the way Elliott pieces a song together: it’s as much about the space he leaves as the instruments he uses.
These songs were written in the wake of Elliott being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (making the fact that he played every instrument even more impressive). At around about the same time, he learned that he was going to be a father. This is where the conflict comes in, and it results in songs that pit wide-eyed hope up against dejection. This dichotomy is most evident on songs like A Million Miles Away, a half-spoken tirade against the state of the world, which is like a synthy, contemporary update of Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, or the piano-led Perfect Tense, an exploration of grief which marries clever, twisty songwriting to a classic, downbeat arrangement, allowing Elliott’s voice, full of Yorkshire nuance, space to roam.
Elliott is as accomplished a musician as he is a singer-songwriter, and all of his talents come into focus on Sirona, with its adroit guitar motif and lyrical appeal to Celtic mythology. Sirona grows from minimal beginnings into a howling psych-folk crescendo, allowing Elliott to indulge his love for vintage sounds. This, along with the classic rock thrum of Joyride and the crashing, growling small-town armageddon of The Keening Train, prove that there are more strings to Elliott’s bow than plain old introspection.
But he is at his best when he lays everything bare. The minimalist, arpeggiated synth patterns that run through Skin in the Game are a masterstroke, growing and throbbing but still giving the anger and bitterness in Elliott’s voice a chance to come to the fore. The title track is more traditional in composition, and here, Elliott’s delivery is rangy and discursive over a slow country-rock arrangement. Seen Nothing Yet is contemplative and piano-led, but haunted by doomy electronics and inexorable synths, the whole thing commenting on the fragility of the natural world and the possibility of its imminent destruction.
The album’s closing track, In God’s Own Country, might just be Elliott’s most ambitious song yet. Set in a Yorkshire landscape apparently wracked by the same environmental apocalypse the previous song warned about, it presents, through spoken word, a child’s eye view of ruin. It’s like nothing he has ever done before, but somehow manages to contain elements introduced in all of the album’s previous nine songs. Structurally, it unfolds like a post-rock epic and features an ominous choir and sweeping synths. Elliott captures perfectly a sense of decay – both moral and environmental – but the song’s final moments (a bucolic ambience decorated by a lacework of mandolin) also offer up hope. He is an expert when it comes to offering up these dualities, making seemingly disharmonious concepts and radically disparate musical ideas work together, and My Role in the Show is the most perfectly realised example of that talent in his distinguished career.
My Role in the Show (6th September 2024) Carbon Moon Records
Bandcamp: https://johnpatrickelliott.bandcamp.com/album/my-role-in-the-show
