Released via Brighton's Crafting Room Recordings, his latest single grapples with familiar modern day anxieties incited by the increasingly erratic powers that be.
Photo: Akos Szaro | Words: Hazel Blacher
Undisputedly one of Brighton's most thrilling live acts right now, the holistic experience of ELLiS.D (aka Ellis Dickson) is not dissimilar to the undulating throes of aircraft turbulence. Gripped by an urgency that extorts your guts to squirm ever closer to the surface of the throat, its immediacy hits you in a high-altitude jet stream of quivering post-punk, art-rock debauchery, rattling you out of your chair and under the heel of Dickson's intoxicating, eldritch yowls. Returning with his second single this year, 'Carousel,' the East Sussex solo artist and drummer is no less restless and tightly wound, describing this new track as "an attempt at mitigating the anxious, paranoid wreck that lives inside us and wants to spoil everything." He goes on to explain it as, "a cathartic fuck you to the parading cowards ripping up the rulebook on human decency in front of our eyes and hiding behind their big red buttons."
Like a locomotive orbiting a perilously rickety track, short, sharp chugs of guitar and pulsing basslines scrape propulsively over the rails. Dickson's vocal flails nervously above like a warning signal welling with smoke, and by the time the song's bridge rolls around, they quickly ignite into a neurotic blaze, engulfing the splaying cacophony of instrumentation in wailing caverns of reverb.
There's something wholly enigmatic and timeless about ELLiS.D's sound, evocative of many revered musical greats throughout history; one magazine even likened Dickson to, "David Byrne becoming a goth and then meeting up with Ian Curtis… or a 2010s indie band."That being said, the magnetising and brazen commitment to full frontal delirium evidenced in both his live and recorded performances is proof that ELLiS.D really is one of a kind.
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