Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9.5/10
We search all our lives for People Like Us, for those we see in the everyday, the faces that melt and merge with the one after another and the slow dawning that our standards are normally too high, that what we seek is impossible to define, all that we can hope for is that somewhere in the world the search is being undertaken, the same snapshot with an instant Polaroid result, that someone out there is looking for a person like you.
It is that search that sometimes the reaching out becomes too intense, that the song is an explosion of colourful metaphor and meaning, that what you may be looking for is not a meeting of minds but just recognition, someone who will never leave the front row of your fan club, who grips hold of the rails and ridicules the over dressed and stern haircut of security and yet still wants to understand why the world is the way that it is.
It is a world inhabited by Liverpool’s Eleanor Nelly with a voice and dynamic that leaves you breathless, so much dedication, an eye for detail which so many of us lack, she is the person to whom you want to sing your song, to be the one reminding others of the search they have all undertaken and the woman to whom that voice resonates as loudly, as sincerely as female inspirations as Janis Joplin and Grace Slick, tender, passionate and strong.
People Like Us encompasses five songs, written with heart, penned with the world arguably on her shoulders but one that never gives in, never allows the heartache or the demand to seep into her passion. From Polaroid, Circles, through to the excellent and poignantly beautiful Front Row and Choke to the E.P.’s title track, People Like Us, Eleanor Nelly inhabits the role of the majestic 21st Century wandering troubadour to great applause, a songbird with a voice that both breaks your heart but tells you in no uncertain terms of how loved you are in the world.
An E.P. that captures of just how far this great Liverpool export has come, already a great, she fully understands that we all need People Like Us in our lives.
Ian D. Hall