John Elliott, AKA the Little Unsaid, could as easily trade under the “rock” banner as that of folk, but being an acoustic-led singer-songwriter, Elliott comes under the F-word in the same way as Joni Mitchell and Roy Harper. Like them, he doesn’t go in for tales from the greenwood and likes to stretch musical boundaries.
There’s a touch of Radiohead on this third album – it’s mixed by Jonny Greenwood’s producer Graeme Stewart – with Elliott’s high, delicate voice floating above an atmospheric, at times eerie melange of guitars, piano, synth and violin.
Like Thom Yorke, Elliott knows how to do misery; romantic desolation bleeds into a fragmented landscape of “backwater towns” and the “beast market”. Mostly, the dozen songs are a dissection of a burned-out relationship, written on a creaky cottage piano, whose chords are sometimes in the mix, a ghost in the room. The opener Human floats in sweetly on strings, but it’s a confession of failure, written in the persona of an over-the-hill crooner. Screws is more personal, a mea culpa, picked out prettily on acoustic guitar, while Atomise, pounded out ponderously, comes with a string quartet recorded in church. Bold and different.
