ClearBits™

Les Etoiles - To Leave A Mark

Last year, David Fitzpatrick, aka Les Etoiles returned to his home town of Bridgnorth, Shropshire. Picturesque and tranquil, caught in a strange timewarp (it possesses both a steam and cliff railway) and boasting what Charles I (who built a castle there) called 'the finest view in all my Kingdom', it’s the town where David grew up and where his family go back three or four generations. To Leave A Mark is a beautiful evocation of this place, its joy and tragedies, the town as a container of people, times, love and loss. It is about how a place, or better, the memories of a place, intertwine with one's self, even when, on returning, those memories are not quite true. It is a testament to a 'homesickness' for 'the memory of a home never seen', to when the sediment of memory matches reality, but also to the more common moments when it does not. Simply recorded in the front room of his parent's home on guitar, keyboards and the drum machine on his grandfather's organ and then carefully produced and mixed by Tim Wright, these are songs of rare warmth and real fragility, rich with emotion and detail. It is a collection to be cherished: one of sadness, joy and uncommon intensity.