(2022) Kate Ellis - Spirals          


Review:
Kate Ellis was born in Louisiana, raised in New York, based in London and is likened to Beth Nielsen Chapman and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Featuring Chris Hillman on electric guitar, pedal steel, resonator, and mandolin, violinist Joseph Paxton, and Andy Hobsbawm on melodica and acoustic guitar, Spirals, her follow-up to her 2017 debut, sees Ellis looking “to find a new understanding of ways to cope with the demons and dramas that can take over our minds”. Or, in simpler terms, how we find a perspective on life’s turmoils and try to find equanimity and hope amid the melancholy, a theme encapsulated in the cascading, strings shaded title track with its alternating time signatures capturing the sense of wandering in your thoughts. It opens with the acoustic strum and resonator guitar of Can’t Not, a simple observation that, while relationships may end, the love may not and how the only way to deal with what you have no control over, be that love or death, is to accept it. On a related theme, it is followed by the waltzing pedal steel and mandolin flavoured Bluebirds And Rye, a song written for her daughter from her own experiences of confusion and hurt about how, whatever emotional hard times you may find yourself going through, when “the waters around you are rising”, ultimately you need to take a deep breath, and know that things will be ok and “You will have your day to shine”. From mother to daughter, the piano ballad Another Way looks back a generation for a song loosely based on her father (who once played guitar with Hank Williams). The story of a flawed man doing the best he can and of the daughter finding forgiveness, understanding their connection and accepting him with all his frailties. It also acknowledges how our personalities and emotional responses are so often shaped by our family experiences (“he was loved but not quite good enough/Her kisses sweet but his father’s touch was a little rough/Love always made him want to pull away… Keeps his southern whiskey and his bitterness on ice…‘Cos he couldn’t see another way”), trapped by the chains of our raising despite our best efforts to break free of them. She explores the idea further, returning to the central theme on quaveringly sung album closer The Story You’ve Been Told, which addresses the patterns of thought and narratives we tell ourselves are true but aren’t necessarily so and of finding a way to escape the maze and the distorted prisms of how we invest in false belief systems of who we are, where we come from, what happened to us and what it means. Shifting concerns, Wonderland with its waterfall of tinkling chimes and gathering anthemic melody strikes an environmental note, a walk in a park inspiring a realisation of the power and beauty of nature and how we are inextricably connected to it and what we stand to lose by not caring for the Earth (“A willow weeps into her cup/And sees her fields turn to dust”), the song originally part of a collaboration with contemporary artist Geraldine van Heemstra for the COP26 climate conference. The hitherto predominantly laid back feel is upended with the scurrying drum rhythms and rowdy barroom rock n roll country of Scars, a playful dysfunctional love song about the fine line between love and hate in relationships (“Heaven has no rage like/Love to hatred turned/But after four bourbons, three scotches two shots and a chaser/I was ready to forgive him again”). When the video premiered on Folk Radio, Kate described it as a love song with attitude, adding “even after the endless rinse and repeat cycles of stormy emotion, there’s still love there in the end – summed up by the song’s closing line: ‘I guess this must be love, ‘cos we can’t get enough’.“ Featuring cello and violin, it’s back to dreamier pastures with Wolf, a number that has its roots in her feeling as a young girl that sadness can also be a form of comfort (“What would I do, without the devil I knew?”) but also acknowledging that keeping the darkness alive because of its familiarity means you never escape from them as “The wolf that you feed more will always win the war”. Of the two remaining cuts, Other Side Of The Street is a cover, written by Tom Hackwood, a former drummer in one of Hobsbawm’s bands, the original conceived as an indie ballad about the bittersweet nature of love but here transformed into a jaunty, pedal steel country-pop toe-tapper. The second, another midtempo fingerpicked folksy shimmer, I Am The Tree, is a song about the cycle of life and death through the generations. The title track of her debut, Carve Me Out, was written on the morning her mother passed, and this too is an exploration of how that has affected her, now, as the surviving matriarch, the head of the family tree rather than a branch, the song about adapting to loss through letting go of the hurt while holding close to the love.





Track List:
1.Can't Not 03:40
2.Bluebirds And Rye 03:19
3.Another Way 04:33
4.Wonderland 03:19
5.Scars 03:06
6.Wolf 03:33
7.Other Side Of The Street 03:39
8.Spirals 02:56
9.I Am The Tree 03:26
10.The Story You've Been Told 03:44


Media Report:
Genre: americana, indie-folk
Country: UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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