‘Now Leaving West Feldwood’ expands Bleach’s capacity for vivid world-building, succinctly expressing the unfulfilled dreams and desires of her fictional universal suburbia.

‘Now Leaving West Feldwood,’ the second EP from London-via-Southend songwriter Ellie Bleach, sustains her reputation for perceptive and captivating songwriting and a combination of contemporary eclecticism and pop classicism. Like her debut, ‘No Elegant Way to Sell Out,’ it is character-driven, but on this collection the songs are more intimately connected by a loose framing device, the situation of each story in a fictional, mysteriously transatlantic town: West Feldwood. Here, the melancholy and tragedy that continues to fascinate Bleach ties characters together and the title captures mood of longing for something better beyond the horizon of the universal smalltown.

Opener ‘Pamela,’ released as a single last year, marked a departure in style from Bleach’s style, which is conventionally more reminiscent of 70s balladry and its evolution into the expansive pop of Lana Del Ray. The heat of our world in the throes of climate change is translated into a sultry lounge instrumentation, clinking with xylophone and arpeggiated acoustic guitar. Pamela serves as our protagonist, preparing for the environmental apocalypse and looking back bitterly at the follies of the people that caused it. She is unusual for a Bleach character in her apparent independence, but we might read her fantasy of the apocalypse “and finally some time alone” as a final concession to society’s rejection of her, with “everybody thinking [she’s] totally batshit.”

‘Lakehouse’ puts us on the road out of West Feldwood, but it is suggested that the two characters will never make it. Our perspective is from the passenger seat as Bleach evokes the simmering tension of a car ride between a couple whose relationship is fraying. “Keep your eyes on the road,” she implores to her partner, while marking the signs of an affair around the car (the “marks on your back” line perhaps a passing reference to Jimi Hendrix’s rather more irreverent ‘Crosstown Traffic’). The half-confirmed murder of her other half (“You’re gonna die when you see it”) gives the restless scene a sense of tragic fate as cool lap steel rolls it along with the road. The chorus invests the song with a broader meaning, capturing the unsatisfying nature of a dull bourgeois life that depends upon a fraying relationship and these tepid ten-day holidays to gain meaning: “It’s gonna take more than a trip to the lakehouse this time.”

‘Hottest Man Alive 1995’ centres on perhaps the album’s saddest subject, and with its standout musical moments, also best elucidates the glistening seduction of escapist dreaming. The speaker fantasises about a celebrity crush (Brad Pitt, if we are to go by the title) to the point of destructive obsession in a perfectly drawn few verses. We see the forced assimilation of problematic beliefs in her defence of his publicised affairs as she complains about “how these liberal types tend to exaggerate.” We feel the hollowness of any potential connection when at a book signing “I heard it in the way you asked, ‘And what is your name, ma’am?’” The pre-choruses get the hopeless optimism of the subject so perfectly, sparkling with organ and glockenspiel as Bleach sings “‘cos you were born to be my man,” before the chorus itself, so dreadfully simplistic by comparison, dives into melodrama: “Tell me what to do! Tell me what to say! I’ll be anything you want!” The EP compares in some details to the music of The Last Dinner Party, whom Bleach supported last year, but where the former keep the melodrama relatable, Bleach uses her characters to explode it and thus perhaps offer deeper cracks into which we can see ourselves. With perhaps the most realistic defence of this character’s mindset, she concludes, “If you think I’m crazy then baby, you’ve never been in love.”

All of Bleach’s characters betray a longing to be loved, formed specifically into a naïve belief that they deserve the kind of love they hope for (with, perhaps, the exception of ‘Pamela,’ who deems herself beyond this). One of her greatest strengths as a songwriter is the unpacking of these ideals by taking them to their melodramatic extremes. In ‘Lakehouse,’ our protagonist desperately plans to kill to break out of her loveless relationship, to “wring the neck of what we used to be.” This claustrophobic motif of suffocation permeates the EP. On ‘Hottest Man Alive,’ the character fantasises about driving in a car with her muse, laughing “‘til I can barely breathe” while on the next track, ‘Whole Lotta Nothing,’ we are faced with a string of hookup scenes, a pairing at one point vulgarly “cornered in the kitchen, hands in each others’ pockets.” Embedded in her characters’ dreams of escape is the underlying will to self-obliteration involved in their imagination of how their dreams may be realised.

‘Whole Lotta Nothing’ is another highlight of the EP, its initial slinking longing evocative of the best of Patsy Cline before a spin into visions of said passionless hookups and cathartic but soulless orgies. Here, the character’s ideal love has been lost, and after a string of “nothings” tell us what she feels looking into the eyes of anyone else, the denouement revealing that “nothing compares to how you held me.” On this track, the expanded sonic palette of the Ellie Bleach extended universe makes its strength felt. After an idiomatic sax solo, any implied 70s predictability is complicated as a string three-piece cuts into the song’s midde eight with Sgt. Pepper vividity. All this builds the richness of the climax, giving the waltzing despair of the final verse its due symphonic scale.

Like the best concept releases, ‘Now Leaving West Feldwood’ allows space for each song to blossom autonomously, its frame acting as an organising factor to connect these stories and invite wider interpretation. This persistent sense of longing joins each together, be it for the fame outlined in ‘That’ll Show ‘Em’ or the devotional love dangerously idealised in ‘Hottest Man Alive.’ The music never lets these characters set both feet on steady ground, viscous with a stateless and time travelling mixture of chamber pop, country, glam and lounge that wisely sees through their innocence. The title track, which closes ‘Now Leaving,’ loses its shape entirely to this morass, a striking orchestral piece in which Bleach’s nostalgic lyrics symbolically drown in the swooning strings against which they are set. While experimenting beyond her familiar sonic palette, Bleach has nonetheless created a signature collection, each song a tight and whole universe conjoined to the whole by the unspeakable suburban dissatisfaction and desire that feeds her imagination.