Reviews
Artist:Kate Ellis Album: Spirals
Label: River Rose
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.kateellis.com
Here's another singer-songwriter whose work (judging by its quality) I should've encountered before but somehow has slipped under my radar. Kate was born in Louisiana and raised in New York, but is now based in London. Her debut album Carve Me Out was released almost five years ago, in 2017, and its themes of coping are developed further on its followup, Spirals. This time the emphasis is more on the inner demons and dramas, and her new batch of songs reflects her attempts "to find a new understanding of ways to cope with the demons and dramas that can take over our minds". Finding a different perspective on life's turmoils and discovering equanimity and hope amid the melancholy.
The musical settings employed by album producer (and drummer) John Reynolds are fulsome and bright, with abundant textural contrast; musicians in tow include Chris Hillman, Joseph Paxton, Andy Hobsbawm and Thomas Collison, so there's always plenty going on in support of Kate's bright-eyed and hopefully reflective lyrics. Several times I was put in mind of Nanci Griffith, even Mary Chapin Carpenter, but with less of a country edge than either perhaps. Each track makes a first-time impact, but my favourites on first few plays are the title song with its shifting time-signatures (expressing all that restless mental energy), opener Can't Not - a simple and sanguine acceptance of circumstance - and the thematically linked Another Way; also I Am The Tree, written after Kate's mother's death, which deals with the way that love enables one to adapt to loss and pain. The gentle album closer The Story You've Been Told brings the circle round again to our ability to find our way out of the emotional maze. In direct sonic contrast, there's the mid-album wild-card, Scars, with its rollicking quasi-punk charge, which conveys that edgy love-hate dilemma that besets any meaningful relationship. In fact, each song on the album encapsulates in its own way the spiral mazes of thoughts and emotions which inhabit our minds.
An album of tender melodies and considered soul-searching, sure, but you emerge out of its spirals into the light of acceptance, joy and yes, hope.
David Kidman
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Fatea Showcase Sessions
The Fatea Showcase Sessions are a series of downloads featuring acts that we've really enjoyed and think that more people should get the chance to hear.
Pirate is the current session and features 16 fantastic artists check out the website to find out more about them and download your copy
www.fatea-showcase-sessions.co.uk for all the artist information.