Lights

Ellie Goulding is a complication thing in a seemingly simple package. On first hearing, she's a bright and shiny 22 year old singer/songwriter, with her fingers on her guitar, her feet in a night-club and her head in the heavens. But very few singer/songwriters, young or old, can flip between dance-til-you-drop euphoria and wistful, journeying space-folk, between lyrics that talk obliquely about sleeping around to those that pin-point the love-hate relationship every leaver has about their hometown. Very few can do all that and leave us, the listeners, with enchantment, curious romance, and somehow, a sense of vastness, of travel, of space and time. It's pop, but not as we know it.