The Little Unsaid - Fable (2022) Hi-Res

John Elliott has been writing and recording as The Little Unsaid for thirteen years with various collaborators and occasionally as a solo artist. He seems to have hit on a winning formula with the current full-band format – Fable is the fourth album as a four-piece, featuring Mariya Brachkova on synths and vocals, Alison D’Souza on viola and sundry other instruments (as well as string arrangements) and Tim Heymerdinger on drums. Elliott himself contributes vocals as well as guitars, bass, keys and programming. If the band dynamic appears familiar, the results are anything but. Elliott’s singing has a little of Thom Yorke about it, while his lyrical preoccupations often touch on mental illness, loss, redemption and man’s place in the world. But there is always an underlying melodicism – he’s like a downbeat Paul McCartney or Nick Cave with a penchant for synth-folk.

It’s a style that has produced a unique and varied oeuvre, and Fable is perhaps his most original and uncompromising set of songs to date. Much of this may be due to the circumstances of their creation – the band stopped off at Mill Farm Studios in rural Dorset after a cancelled gig and used the time to improvise and record. It was one of the first chances they’d had to play together since the onset of covid, and the resulting recordings are like an outpouring of all the strange and new feelings that had accrued during lockdown.

The first two songs – Far Gone and Went Out Too Far, are both concerned with distance; this is no accident. The former deals with distance, time and the bittersweet effects of living at a remove. It is a ruminative, lightly-strummed indie-folk song decorated with pretty strings, but like most of Elliott’s songs, it conceals a darker side, hinted at by the wobbly synths that act as the unstable ground on which the song is built. The latter is altogether more discomfiting, beginning with cut-up vocal samples and strange electronic tinkerings that lurk like sonic banana skins underfoot, partly concealed by the song’s dark percussive pulse.

The title track has the feel of a miniature post-rock epic, a knotty riff scuttling around in the song’s underbelly while the vocals soar and sigh above. Tiny details build up within the space of a song to create complex sound-pictures – on Real To You At Least, these delicate strokes are provided by subtle keys and occasional plucked guitar strings, as well as the sudden and just perceptible changes in the song’s feel that occur like unexpected temperature drops in a room.

How Will We Catch Them Out is full of graceful strings and has a poise and lightness that sounds effortless but is no doubt hard to achieve (otherwise, everyone would be doing it). Elliott’s music is both introspective and expansive, which sounds paradoxical but is actually a pretty good model for the workings of the human mind, in which despair and creativity can often coexist. It is also worth noting that Elliott’s extremely personal songs can also be explicitly political. He is a writer supremely aware of the power of contrasts and juxtapositions. There is an icy funk to a song like Big Red that acts as a perfect backdrop to the outpouring that follows; taken together, it can only be the work of a musician with a keen melodic sensibility as well as a knack for drama.

One Step At A Time begins almost like a religious mantra before collapsing into a near-stream-of-consciousness vignette, a theme that lead-single Vibrant Life takes to even further extremes of lyricism. Night Train begins with an electronic skitter which veers in the direction of IDM – think in terms of an imaginary collaboration between Jeff Buckley and Four Tet – while closer Sleep Tight seems to be designed to give you weird dreams. It takes the simple piano ballad in all sorts of unexpected directions while the soothing backing vocals coax you siren-like into a hallucinogenic slumber. The essence of The Little Unsaid’s songcraft is that good things (strange and remarkable things, too) can come out of bad times or uncomfortable situations. Their music is all about those contrasts, and Fable illustrates them more sharply than anything they’ve done before.