Dove Ellis: Blizzard review | Dave Simpson’s album of the week
The information age has made it much more difficult for artists to cultivate mystique. Gone are the days when David Bowie could seemingly arrive fully formed with Space Oddity and Hunky Dory, with most of the record-buying public unaware of his years of struggle in bands such as the Lower Third; or when Robert Zimmerman could become Bob Dylan and invent a backstory about running away with the circus as a teenager. Today’s artists are so intensely scrutinised once they get even a glimmer of success that there’s always the chance some internet sleuth will blow a performer’s cred by unearthing a terrible video of them caterwauling through Wonderwall in sixth form. Which makes Dove Ellis so thoroughly unusual, because so little is known about him.
His debut album arrives with no biography and barely any information at all apart from the track listing and a few minor details. He doesn’t appear to have ever given an interview and in one song here scolds: “Keep their cameras off my face.” His publicist, whose job thus far seems solely to be sending out music, describes Ellis as a “an introverted character”.
One can piece together this: he’s 22 and from Galway but relocated to Manchester. The songs he posted on Bandcamp led to a bidding war, but he rejected the attentions of major labels to go with an independent. He recently opened for Geese on their US tour dates but otherwise seems to have been playing pubs and small venues in London (including the buzzy Windmill) and Manchester for a couple of years now. As recently as October he was opening the student night at Sheffield’s Sidney & Matilda, where he apparently went down the usual storm. His next London show (at the ICA on 9 December) sold out within an hour, but if his self-produced debut arrives to burgeoning expectations it’s entirely because of the quality of the music.
The few reviewers who have seen Ellis so far mostly compare him to Jeff Buckley or his father, Tim Buckley – fair comparisons given how Ellis’s remarkable vocals can settle into a dreamy falsetto so fragile he could be dancing on a pin, and then suddenly perform a handbrake turn into intensity, even anger. The way the arrangements (including saxophone and drums) dart around his voice in ornate little counter-melodies recalls fellow Irishman Van Morrison, and recent single To the Sandals noticeably nods to Joan Armatrading’s Love and Affection. Thom Yorke and Rufus Wainwright have also been mentioned, but none of these comparisons quite pin Ellis down, not least because he shifts shape so frequently.
Beautiful opener Little Left Hope begins as fragile as Nick Drake, but erupts into something much more rousing, the words capturing the rocky road to making music: “Maybe we’ll start a band / With the stranger you have to like / Cos he knows how to play the drums.” Ellis’s lyrics frequently seem to flutter between hope and despair, before building to a purifying conclusion. In the magically warm Pale Song, the past is a trouble which, perhaps, can be shaken off: “The past is like a sign / A sign it never talks / A sign you think you’ve lived / But it’s just stone with a little chalk.” In the singalong-friendly Love Is, he roars, “Love is not the antidote to all your problems,” but concludes, “Love is your last chance.” In Jaundice he uses the unlikely vehicle of rumbustious rock’n’roll infused with an Irish jig to seemingly rail against unfairness: “Sometimes a child is born without any face / At the breast of their own mother right out of place.”
Ellis has described To the Sandals – a Bandcamp release now mixed/spruced up by Big Thief producer Andrew Sarlo – as concerning “reflections on a failing shotgun marriage in Cancún”. Not that the unlikely subject of an ill-fated union hastened by pregnancy in Mexico is particularly obvious in lines such as: “From your grace / The sadist fails / Their red blade / A-rallying, tallying.”
Trying to unravel the songs’ meanings can become a parlour game, but it’s enough to savour his dazzling use of language or the sheer emotion in heart-swelling songs such as When You Tie Your Hair Up. The 10 tunes are so strong they seem as familiar as old friends, and if Ellis isn’t reinventing the wheel, he’s certainly giving the old thing a caring coat of varnish. His songs sound meticulously crafted but the recordings themselves have a beautifully intimate, unadorned, down-home feel. At times, the picked and strummed guitars, rolling 70s rock piano, wind instruments and clattering percussion are interspersed with random noises and distortion, but somehow everything seems to have fallen perfectly into place on a glorious debut.
This week Dave listened to
Louis O’Hara – Magpie
From Pembroke Dock in west Wales, this gently folksy tribute to a longstanding friendship is unusually touching and truly lovely.
