The Little Unsaid – Music/Nature
Reveal Records – 8 November
While, all swirling synths, the opening track Music is an EP version of a track from The Little Unsaid’s recently released Atomise. It’s a song about knowing who you are and embracing it, where front-man John Elliott sings “I’ve got all kinds of suffering/To celebrate”, the five other numbers on this EP are all previously unreleased recordings from the same sessions which, while extending reflective themes about finding hope and meaning in a time of fragmentation, didn’t find a place on the album.
Nature, as you might assume, has an environmental slant, a pulsingly atmospheric, vocally spooked and strings-textured song about, as he says, “the relationship between humanity and the natural world when we finally confront the irreversible destruction” that prowls and gathers to a head with hints of both Roger Waters and Peter Gabriel.
Echoingly structured around drop-tuned guitars and analogue synths, the slower, but no less atmospheric Floodlight (and you might hear Kate Bush influences in this) also addresses the idea of tension, here about letting go of those moments in the past that have a stranglehold on the present. A similar idea informs the intimately sung Solstice which, etched on minimal piano notes, pulsating percussion and choral loops, concerns how ancient ideas of masculinity and desire, the animal within, can impact destructively on a relationship.
Rolling piano notes again form the musical core for Milltown, steeped in reflective, wistful nostalgia, looking back at formative years in a small northern town (“I’ve got cul de sacs and dirt tracks etched all down my spine”) with memories of fistfights, being blind drunk in the street at 17, scraping knuckles raw on the dry stone wall, and of digging “my first songs from the cow shit and the pain that walled us in”, and gulping a first kiss in the scrapyard.
Recorded in one take, it ends with a current live staple, the meditative fingerpicked (A Sweet Kind Of) Hurt which, with choral background vocals, offers Elliott’s take on a familiar theme of how without darkness there’s no light and that pain is a life-affirming necessity to an appreciation of existence as he reminiscences about “an urge to vomit on sacred ground or a hand going up a skirt” and the need to “breathe lungfuls of the dark” to be able to rise again and “decide what life is worth”. On Music he sings “There’s a breath/Lifts you up/To where you belong”. Inhale.
The CD/EP is available via Reveal Records, a Limited Edition of 500 – https://revealrecords.bigcartel.com/product/the-little-unsaid-music-nature-cdep-2019
The Little Unsaid UK Tour Dates
November
Sat 16th Oswestry – Hermon Chapel Arts Centre
Sun 17th Birmingham – Kitchen Garden Café
Wed 20th Sheffield – The Greystones
Thu 21st Corsham – Pound Arts Centre
Fri 22nd Truro – Old Bakery Music Studios
Sat 23rd South Petherton (Yeovil) – The David Hall
Sun 24th Exeter – Phoenix Arts Centre
Wed 27th Ashburton – Arts Centre
Thu 28th Aldershot – West End Arts Centre
Fri 29th Ettington – Ryepiece Barn House Concerts
Sat 30th Winchester – The Railway Inn
December
Mon 2nd London –The Lexington
Sat 21 Folkestone – Upstairs @ The Eleto Chocolate Cafe
January
Sat 18 Broadstairs – Sarah Thorne Theatre
Fri 24 Glasgow – Celtic Connections Festival
Ticket Links: http://www.thelittleunsaid.com/live/