Insightful lyrics and a delicate voice contrast with full-bodied horns to make a debut that feels authentically true to itself.
They say art does not come easy, and that’s certainly something Elanor Moss found when trying to put together her debut album The Knife, The Needle. After first finding herself chasing a “sound” over what moved her, it took her three years to finally get the songs together that felt like the kind of music that made her, as she puts it, “really feel something”. That’s a sense of feeling that immediately jumps out of the speakers as soon as Moss’s high, feather-light voice opens on Fixer: “Baby you’re a fixer / And I want to make it better,” she says with fragile longing. “Somewhere, deep down / I’m afraid that if you show me the knife / I might use it on you babe,” she goes on to confess before flipping the script with the lyrics that lend themselves to titling the album: “That maybe what we thought of as a knife / Is just a needle we could use / To stitch the wound?”
“Again, my love / We’re at another open door again,” she sings with some level of apprehension on Again, My Love, a particular kind of vulnerability encased in the sweet lilt of her voice as she speaks of “Something lost for something gained again” and “Swapping sunshine for the rain again” against gentle acoustic guitar. Sarah, Waiting in the Car, one of the first songs written for the album, is starkly effective at illustrating how a once promising relationship can turn violent as Moss moves the lyrics sharply from a simple meeting at a bar to a “Fist around [her] neck” all while, as an extra blow, her housemates fail to notice anything wrong.
On Secrets of the Universe, Moss paints just as evocative picture, although this time a gentler one, as she opens with “Trading secrets of the universe / Around your kitchen table” before proving she has a sense of humour too when she adds that “In the cold light of the morning / It hits me without warning / I want to be the kind of woman / That owns a teapot.” Clothes in a Hotel Sink takes on the well-worn topic of trying to maintain a relationship while on the road, but does it in a tongue-in-cheek way as Moss sings of washing her clothes in the sink before posing in the bathroom mirror for a snap to send to a long-distance love.
Generational trauma is explored insightfully on Louise: “I’m still your daughter’s daughter,” Moss sings to her grandmother before she adds pithily, “Your daughter’s still insane”, going on to tell how her grandmother now spends her days watching television, all the fight she once had lost to endless “tennis reruns”. Proving she’s wise enough to know that she knows nothing, on The Way That It Feels she sings like a lark of how it feels to know someone but at the same time to not know them at all, “Maybe in the way [they’re] changing” or even “Maybe in the way [they’re] staying the same”.
A lot of musicians use their own music as a kind of therapy, but Moss found that to create The Knife, The Needle she needed to start the practice again in the more traditional sense, saying of the experience that “Out of the slowness and quiet of those rhythms came these songs”. By unpacking her history, she managed to find her future, crafting songs that, while never big or brash, come together to make an album that’s as quietly devastating as it is sonically lush thanks to Matthew Herd’s beautiful arrangements throughout. Easy to bring to life? Perhaps not, but definitely worth the therapy bill.
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