Astute politically charged songwriting with rock’n’roll arrangements.
Now based in Brooklyn via Arizona and Utah, Charles Ellsworth produces this fifth album with Blake Tallent, the guitar player for Sarah Shook & The Disarmers. Across 11 engaging tracks, his voice hits a similar tenor-voiced timbre to that of Will Hoge or Willy Braun of Reckless Kelly.
‘LAX Song’ opens the album with Ellsworth sat at LA airport pining for his lady back in New York: “I miss her red hair in the morning and how it seems to lighten with the day”. ‘Avenue of the Giants’ has him “distracted by the wonder of just being alive” set to a breezy melody and arrangement that includes a mighty guitar solo.
‘If They Let Me Choose Forever’ is another rocker on which Ellsworth remembers a thrilling meeting with a girl at 18 when he was “ready to abandon all reason”, and ‘Crazy Kelly’ also looks back on when Ellsworth “started running so I didn’t have to fall in line”; listen out on the latter for the line “these trinkets of a mind misremembering its bliss”, which gives you some idea of the level of songwriting here.
On the deliberately lo-fi ‘Swimming in the Shades of Grey’, where a resigned Ellsworth sounds like he hasn’t slept for days, he wonders whether he found out what he was running from. It’s a novelistic song which includes the highly sibilant line “soaking like a stray searching for shelter from the storm”. ‘Ripped to Ribbons’ marries a hopeful, introspective lyric (“balanced on a beam while pulling on a tug of war”) to pedal steel and a heavy drumbeat from wire brush thwacks.
‘The Gates’, on which he notes how people “keep working more and getting less”, ends with a declaration to “tear down” religion itself, while the angry chugger ‘Another Fucking Tuesday’ opens with a school shooting and nods ironically in the chorus to ‘Jack & Diane’ (“oh yeah, life goes on”). The personal is political on ‘Build a Bigger Table’, a soft acoustic number where Ellsworth outlines a series of aspirations: “leave it better than I found it here”, “lead with compassion and grace”, and in a reference to the opioid epidemic, “the Sacklers to pay for what they did”.
‘If I Could Talk to God’ ends the album with some more rock’n’roll that once again soundtracks a belligerent lyric; the narrator is angry at the Lord, his boss, army recruiters, “pundits and capitalists” and himself, although he hopes he can retire and “stare at the surf”. There is enough light and shade on the album to make it a worthwhile listen.
