Lights

Ellie Goulding is a complicated thing in a seemingly simple package. On first hearing, she’s a bright and shiny 22 year old singer-songwriter, with her fingers on her guitar, her feet in a night-club and her head in the heavens. But very few singer-songwriters, young or old, can flip between dance-til-you drop euphoria (‘Starry Eyed ) and wistful, journeying space-folk (Guns and Horses), between lyrics that talk obliquely about sleeping around (Under The Sheets ) and those that pin-point the love-hate relationship every leaver has about their home town (Wish I Stayed). Very few can do all that and leave us, the listeners, with enchantment, curious romance and, somehow, a sense of vastness, of travel, of space and time, It’s pop, Jim, but not as we know it. Ellie’s songs are built around big proper tunes that lift you up and spin you round, yet there’s something off-centre about them, something sparkly, filmic, haunting, odd. She mixes heartfelt emotion with other-worldly atmospherics, spins cool electronica into dreamy warmth.