Review: The Little Unsaid, The Folk House – ‘Utterly life-affirming’

As the first half of a helter-skelter set from The Little Unsaid came crashing to a close, John Elliott held an imaginary globe in his hand, squeezed it and dashed it to the floor; “You’ve just got to grab hold of life”, he said “like this”.

With that his extraordinary band galloped off, singing a winter song – Fine World (When You Can Look It in the Eye) – with masses of swish and bounce. The scene was set.

That desperate need to grab hold of life and squeeze is revisited in countless different ways tonight. It’s there in the huge choruses and the squelchy beats, it’s there in the restless, relentless drive of a four-piece, shape shifting band, it’s there in Elliott’s voice which is a wondrous thing.

Most of all it’s there in the songs – stadium sized epics played to a small room, songs with feet anchored to the earth, gazing at the moon.

Those songs make The Little Unsaid almost impossible to catagorise. They’re post-folk-weird-jazz-prog-rock-alt-pop and they’re fantastic.

Vibrant Life starts like some sort of Byronic poetry, it’s all Jeff-Buckley-high-voiced wordiness until Mariya Brachkova hurls some beats into the air and Elliott straps on his guitar and everything changes.

Alison D’Souza’s violin crests the waves and Tim Heymerdinger’s jazzy drum propels the whole thing over the precipice.

The beats hit again on Night Train; they whomp and burble, causing the violin to skitter and scutter across the song. All the while Elliott’s voice is high, warm and powerful. Creating a magical centre that everything else enfolds.

It’s the layers built around the songs that are most thrilling. Just as you think you have a handle on a song, something else happens. Far Gone starts as a 90s indie pop song, with faint echoes of The Auteurs, but ends with Keiran Hebden-like organic electronics.

The title track of their most recent album, Fable, has a skeletal, funky bass threaded through a multi-textured world populated by a plucked violin and Brachkova’s beautiful voice.

Imagined Hymn has ripples of guitar, shimmers of violin and an open-mouthed love of nature.

There’s more than a dash of unashamed art rocking at times too. Lyrically there’s some “important stuff” poetic grandeur and Elliott’s guitar throws all manner of shapes.

It comes as no surprise that he has written the songs to a West End musical – Cruise – because the theatricality is all too obvious.

There’s also, on In This House, a respectful nod to Kate Bush. Not that they sound similar, it’s just that you feel as if the wardrobes in their bedrooms might lead to the same place.

Perhaps it’s the final three songs of the second set that tell you all that you need to know of The Little Unsaid. Milltown is a hymn to Yorkshire; it’s slow, gentle, autobiographical. It sort of reminds you of Elbow at their most wide-eyed and is quite delightful.

That juts up against Chains, where sleazy Berlin nightclub beats give way to breath-taking violin and culminates in full on, eyes to heaven elegy. If God is a DJ she, surely, plays this.

Second Circle is a Victorian murder ballad given a modern urgency, it whizzes along on a great big percussive raft until it ends with the whole band hitting and shaking things.

By the end, every single drop has been squeezed from life. In the encore John Elliott sits, alone, at his keyboard to sing Day Is Golden. From a delicate vulnerability comes a simple message – “it’s fine being alive”. Utterly life-affirming.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

Read next:

• Review: Maja Lena, The Louisiana – ‘A night full of cosiness, beauty and connection’
• Review: Jadu Heart, Rough Trade – ‘The pair are just deeply deeply cool’
• Review: Charm of Finches, The Folk House – ‘They create the most beautiful, natural space you could imagine’

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