Elliott - Photorecording

Thu 29th Sep, 2005 in Music Reviews

According to iTunes, Elliott’s music is ‘unclassifiable’ in genre.  Elliott formed in 1995 in Louisville in the U.S. In this time, the band released three studio albums. In 2003, Elliott decided to go their separate way and in November of that year, played their last gigs together.

‘With us, it was a point of, ‘is there another record there we knew that we had to write together?’ And it wasn’t like an overwhelming, pressing gut feeling to do that,’ says the band’s front man Chris Hidgon, while sitting out the back of friend/booking agent/manager Eva Alexiou’s house.

Photorecording is a live studio album recorded right after Elliott’s last performance together. The fact that this is a live studio album helps to create the atmosphere that this is the band’s last project together. It’s getting back to basics, like the first or last jam in the back shed

Photorecording also comes with a bonus DVD, featuring a documentary called In Transition: A Film about Elliott, a great insight into a band I had never before heard. ’I’ve heard, ‘They should be huge.’  ‘They should be Coldplay.’ ‘They should be Radiohead,’’ says Eva ’...people always compared them with ‘Why aren’t they huge?’  ‘Why didn’t they ever overpass the indie world?’‘

In Transition documents the final days of the band, very melancholic in tone, it is a goodbye; a farewell; a final song, like holding onto the last piece of your favourite record – you know the songs inside out; every idiosyncratic tone in your favourite singer’s voice that manages to melt your bitter heart time and time again but you wish just once it would surprise you and not end just yet.

There doesn’t seem to be any bitter feelings between the band – a clean break. It’s simply a decision that everyone thought was best.  No more flogging a dead horse, I guess. (Since I’m on the subject of animals, the documentary contains a hilarious incident with a pigeon outside a gig.)

‘You always have to compromise when you’re in a band; always…no one ever gets their way all the time, but there’s a breaking point…when the compromising gets to a point where you’re just…not happy,’ says drummer, Kevin Ratterman. You’d be forgiven for thinking this statement carries a bit of bitterness, but in its context, it is obvious that the band just felt they had made all the music they needed to together, and by making any more, they may end on a bad note.

Elliott has an atmospheric feel similar to Radiohead and Coldplay with a bit of a pop sensibility to a lot of the songs. In Calm Americans, Hidgon sings accusingly ‘You’ve Americanised everything.’ The song This Program is Not Responding, for a second had me thinking that iTunes had had trouble importing a song.

Photorecording took a few listens to draw me in. I watched the DVD first and thought Blessed By Your Own Ghost was a beautiful song, and still do, but the rest of the record passed by not making much of an impression on me. But that said it seems it has had a big impact on a lot of people. The documentary captures a moment with Eva, sitting at her kitchen table recounting her favourite Elliott show. She says with a big smile across her face, ‘People that aren’t Elliott fans, that see them for the first time, you can definitely see the change in their faces…’

‘It’s going to be so overwhelming for me, playing the last songs,’ says Ratterman before the band’s last ever gig. Like the last few pages of a really good book, you can see and feel the right side of the book getting smaller and smaller and the weight of the left hand side pulling down. You want to get to the end, you want resolution and to know your favourite characters will all be okay, but when you get there, a part of you misses it.

In the immortal words of The Doors, ‘This is the end, beautiful friend.’