Les Étoiles is the nom de guerre of Shropshire-born singer-songwriter David Fitzpatrick.
In a genre crowded with violent mediocrity in the mainstream and even consistently uninteresting ideas at the margins, Les Étoiles is a talent. The best singer-songwriters are about dense recollection of mood and vivid attention to detail, lyrics that are resonant of times and places, beautiful turns of phrase, delicacy and almost ascetic emotional honesty. Like Elliott Smith, Will Oldham, Songs: Ohia and perhaps even Leonard Cohen and Neil Young before him, David’s songs are transportive and transformative, even redemptive. They are like following the beauty of following single rain down a pane of glass. That time. Those places. That sadness. That trickling joy.
David has been home recording and passing out at first cassette compilations and more recently CD-R EPs since the turn of the millennium. It was by this means that I first got to hear his unique work: a tape dub direct from an ancient PC handed to me at a lonely hostelry. What was on this tape, even then, was stunning: beautifully crafted songs, production that had an exquisite depth, evocative lyrics and all delivered in David’s hushed but intense voice. A few later recordings fell into my possession. His A Closed Room EP was a love letter to a practice room, full of echoes and lost things, warm pianos and distant effects. He performed a patient, incredible cover of Plainsong by The Cure that brought a crowded cafe to reverent silence. He sent me a cover of I See A Darkness paced at quarter-speed, each word ringing out with redoubled urgency, each note animated by diligent care.
His work is a master class in the minimalism that bands such as Low and late Talk Talk perfected: sparse, almost too intimate, moving and utterly genuine. The songs are concise, impressionistic sketches of resignation, haunting nostalgia for adolescence and love, memories of a picturesque hometown that both hems in and reassures with forgotten memories emerging at every corner, imagined dialogue with long-deceased family members, anxiety about frittering away one’s youth conflicting with desire to slip away into seclusion. Beautiful.
