Elliott
“Song in the Air”
(Revelation Records)
A friend of mine borrowed this CD from me before I could listen to it and he gave it back to me like two days later. “This thing sucks,” he told me. “There’s barely any singing. It’s mostly instrumental, the songs are all moody and slow and I hated it.” Well, he was right about a few things. The songs are moody (not to mention pretty long), some are slow (a few lack any real direction), there are plenty of instrumental sections (there’s a string quartet prominently featured throughout) but suck? Certainly not.
Elliott’s ethereal ambient sounds waft their way through the darkly haunting bridges and melodies, making you wish you had a bottle of wine and a lost love to mourn. The album does move at a slower pace than Elliott’s older stuff, but it’s the quicker tracks that seem to suffer from a near-fatal lack of both honesty and intensity. The ease with which Elliott captures the blackness of a shadow and the silence of depression on “Song in the Air” is something that will stick with you for a long time. Enjoy.
