Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier – The Little Unsaid

The 10th anniversary album by The Little Unsaid.

Founded and fronted by John Elliott, and featuring Alison D’Souza on strings, Mariya Brachkova on synths and backing vocals and drummer Tim Heymerdinger, the band drew on 10 years of working together to improvise their entire new album with nothing written in advance, inspired by whatever scribbles he would come up with in the moment, recorded inside Lightship 95, an iron hulled boat recording studio moored to a wharf on London’s River Thames.

The results were then knocked into shape for the studio with session bassist Sonny Johns, the songs and the prevalent colour imagery forming a lyrically complex and enigmatic theme about the frontiers, both external and internal, that need to be crossed in order to move forward, bidding old selves goodbye and growing beyond those self-imposed boundaries. It is, says Elliott, about “embracing all the painful things life has thrown at us along the way, the heartbreak and loss, knowing that more is no doubt coming for us down the line. Staying open to this, welcoming it, we also welcome unimaginable joy and connection. When we close off to the shadows we close ourselves off to the light too, to the true magic of life and our potential for a level of connection, love and imagination that we desperately need in these times”.

All of the songs starting with the letter S, it opens with the cobwebbed sound of ‘Strangers’, where, to D’Souza’s viola and contrasting backing vocals by Brachkova and Heymerdinger, he invites

Dance beyond yourself with me
Fill up with morning mist
Let fingers find that ice cold key
And give it a little twist

until

we make good strangers of our selves;
And life has just begun.

The first of three five minute plus numbers, with pulsing percussion and swirling electronics, the otherworldly ‘Song of the Unforeseen’ has lyrics that ride a Pennine childhood memory stream of consciousness:

Way back in that bric-a-brac childhood
You’d scoop me up when I fell in play
How the kneecaps cut on those millstone days
That go round, round, round
All through my blood

as it moves, spiralling out through the years

Til we know what it means
All the secrets of this world
Gettin’ stuck in the greed machine

turning into a semi-spoken passage about loss and emotional rescue:

we snapped so easy on those long-gone granite days
like roots burst out the pavement stones
the past bursts out your warping bones
I watched you outgrow our bin liner backstreet love
our eager playground blood all streamed
‘cross ragged clothes and smiles
and muddy footprints on the kitchen tiles
and will you come back
and hold me a little while?
….
I’m holding you together
You been holding me together.

An electronic heartbeat underpins ‘Sundown, Coldharbour Lane’ with its soul music DNA and further almost manic awakenings to the root connections of the past as

you see your old life
Reflected in the river
River that’s a road
That’s a recognition
You were once an idea
Curl of cigarette smoke
Dancing into New Year’s Day.

Like most of the songs, the lyrics are impressionistic, inviting you make emotional rather than literal sense of lines like

Better hold you as I shake
Hold me as I shake
Peace is the night
And the night is
Heart break

opening with the lines

I limp through the dazzling morning
Like a ghost
Old parts of me fall like fungus flesh
In the frost
I count my steps up the blistered hillside.

His vocals deeper, backed by keys and strings, Maria Guardiola on sax, the atmospherically sparse and lengthy title track echoes his call not to metaphorically harden your heart to the possibility and need for change

I’m gonna stay fragile
All across this cold frontier

as he urges

Spit chestnut teeth and peel the bark
From each other’s backs
Feel the cruel wind blow, and know
I love you so

Burst bloody and wild
And alive beside the divine
Angels are coming
To watch o’er your sleep.

Woven with electronic hisses and strings, call and response vocals, ‘Shoreline Prayer’ is a simple number about keeping the lines of connection open,

You got to reach for the bones of another
In this life

and about personal rebirth

I am falling
In love
With beginning
Again

It also has the album’s most sexual imagery in lines like

I just end up chipping stories
Into the shoreline of your pelvic bone …

And as your body yawned wide open
I confess I ached to dip my spoon

The album’s motorik rock n roll of sorts, ‘Surfacing’ rides a steamrollering almost Floydian cum dark Bowie propulsive drive in its seismic maelstrom of upheavals

All my memories are as molten rock
They twist the landscape deep in me
Contort and shift beneath my feet

I’ve journeyed ‘cross them jagged plains
Tried to melt them down or chip away
My feet cut up as the plates would shift
And I moaned in the hollows of every rift

Then one day I looked down in waking bliss
Saw each foothold to the next exists
Only ’cause of a moment, burst my world wide
And it carved my path to the other side

as we

In our mad morning dances
Push through the dark wet canvas
One step forward
One step back

and find

The worlds within us, they are wild and true
As brutal and beautiful as the one right outside you.

The slow, rumbling ‘Seawall State of Mind’ is a psychedelic narcotic blues that again talks of coming out from behind self-erected barriers and engaging with the world beyond

heading for the banks
Of the Rubicon
…
When my times comes
I’m going down to that river.

It moves to a conclusion with songs that speak of finding illumination (as chanted by the backing vocals), of realising you can never arrive if you never leave, first with the itchy percussive, dank blues of ‘Shadows Are Where The Truth Gets Told’ and its revelation that

There’s a rhythm to this rolling world
And I have yet to step in time
Is this hand yours?
Is this hand mine?
Oh god this lights me up inside.

The change lies in our own heart and hands, making the story our own because within the darkness the light is just waiting to shine.

The third five-minute track is the piano-shaded, tender ‘So Long Skinny Blue’, and the letting go of those things that kept you lost in the dark

Now the story I told
Is crumbling like old rotten bark
On the hawthorn tree
It kept me safe in the storm
But oh how it kept me in the dark
For so long.

With the lines
You pulled us through, Skinny Blue
Tiny hands covering my eyes
Come on, let me see the sky

it’s tempting to interpret it as parenthood or love being the wake-up call:

I could not have made it on my own
Now here we are dancing slow
Before I slip away into the sun
Stepping out in love with everyone
With every crooked thing I’ve ever done
I did it to survive, and we survived
Isn’t life a fine surprise?
My snapped little saviour
My beady-eyed masquerade.

Opening with Brachkov’s whispered vocal, it ends with the thematically linked fingerpicked ‘Small Windows’:

When I saw you standing over me
You let go of every page
Where I’d inked my name
All that paper in the wind, my god
What a gift you gave.

The album’s most musically straightforward and folksy number, it’s the epiphany of awakening into the beautiful unknown to which everything’s been heading:

Small windows
Are opened to the spring
Open your eyes
You’ve arrived
And now begin

…
Love moves like a moon and it swings
In and out every day
Dark and light all at once, my god
What a gift you gave.

And what a gift this is too.