LOVE songs to marine creatures don’t come along too often in pop, but neither do artists like Faith Eliott.
The Minneapolis-born musician, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them”, may have created the only ode to a sea sponge in Loomis, one of nine delightful tracks to feature on Impossible Bodies, their long-awaited debut album.
Just as each entry in a mediaeval bestiary depicts an animal and the meaning it symbolises, Impossible Bodies is based on the same framework, with each song representing a different creature.
Eliott, who has lived in Scotland since the age of 13, spent much of their youth “skulking around museums and old churches” with their historian parents and says making an album based on the structure of a bestiary had been percolating in their brain for “absolutely ages”.
A practising artist as well as a musician, Eliott’s world is one immersed in folklore, natural history and a DIY spirit which sees them make hand-printed posters, costumes and jewel-encrusted headphones.
All the different media feed into each other, they say, and Eliott’s ideas and aesthetic find joyful, intriguing expression in the video to Lilith, the lead single from Impossible Bodies.
Inspired by the mythological figure of Lilith, the long-since demonised first wife of Adam, the song features lyrics about liberating snakes from a petting zoo and hot-footing it down the M8.
The video sees Eliott in bejewelled robes, carrying a staff as they walk around wind farms and city streets, finding magical stones.
“When I find them all and put them in a row, there’s a flash of lightning and I disappear,” Eliott says. “I’ve been freed from my own body.”
The tropical temperatures at Edinburgh’s Butterfly and Insect World made filming there impossible.
“That was the place I wrote the song about but we tried to film me singing to a snake, but it was so hot in there, the camera kept steaming up,” they say.
Elsewhere on the record is Jungftak, about a mythical Persian bird with one wing, and the tender Laika, which sees the body of the doomed space dog being taken from her little space ship to join the stars.
Eliott explains: “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about constellations and realised that a lot of the stories behind constellations being named after women, like Cassiopeia and Andromeda, that they were put in the sky as a punishment. In the song, Laika is joining them.”
Impossible Bodies was recorded in Seattle with Colin Nelson of Virgin Of The Birds, a San Francisco band with whom Eliott shared a label home on Edinburgh’s Song, By Toad Records.
Song, By Toad released Eliott’s debut EP Insects, whereas the album is out on OK Pal Records, the new label Eliott has set up with fellow Edinburgh-based musician Hailey Beavis.
Though Eliott only started writing their own songs a few years ago, they’ve long been a name in the city’s DIY music and visual arts scene, especially that which centred on the Forest Cafe at its old base near the National Museum of Scotland.
It is hoped that OK Pal Records, Eliott says, will create a similarly creative community with a can-do spirit.
“The DIY scene is really not very nurtured and it’s harder and harder to find spaces in Edinburgh,” they say. “I think the festival is a real burden in a way, as during the rest of the year, there’s closed doors and it’s very hard to put things on.”
Elliot adds: “One of the reasons I do this is because I walked into the Forest Cafe when I was 17 and I thought: ‘I can do anything.’
“Just people encouraging you, giving you that agency, is so important. They gave you encouragement to go bigger. A lot of people don’t realise they can go bigger and just do whatever they want.”
Faith Eliott supports Diane Cluck: April 16, St Vincent’s Chapel, Edinburgh, 8pm, £10. Tickets: www.wegottickets.com
Impossible Bodies album launches: May 5, Hug and Pint, Glasgow, 7.30pm, £7.
Tickets: www.thehugandpint.com; May 10, Skylight, Edinburgh, 7pm, £TBC.
Impossible Bodies is released on OK Pal Records on April 19. www.faitheliott.com
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