Busker of the Day: Melissa Elledge

Wow. I have fallen into a rut in the last six months. I have stuck safely to my electronic favorites and been revisiting some indie rock staples that I hold dear. Every once in a while though, something new awakens my interest in non-conventional forms of music, and I fall down a bizarre rabbit hole of bluegrass or melodic Norwegian metal.

Melissa Elledge may have just become the arbiter for a whole new adventure into the orifices of the accordion. I did not wake up expecting it, and I did not know it really even existed. I mean, it is like bacon wrapped donuts. I guess I knew they could be a thing, but I was not aware someone was legitimately making them.

This all makes me either the worst person ever to review accordion cover music or the best. But this is not so much a review as it is an appreciation for new and invigorating sounds. When the system gets dull, you spice it up with some serious creativity. Elledge is a masterful and empowering force on her instrument of choice. Her accordion rendition of Lux Aeterna is absolutely stunning. The original song comes off the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack (it is also the theme). It is an almost absurdly powerful orchestrated piece of massive weight and scale. Yet Elledge removes all those layers while also delivering something just as powerful in a very different way. The song’s sheer simplicity and single source of sound gives it a quaint haunting feeling- you feel the waves of the big original version being condensed into a single melody. It is an incredible piece of work.

Yet Elledge is musically versed enough to compliment that song with a rendition of Coolio’s 90’s breakthrough, Gangster’s Paradise. It hits that essential hook but reconfigures it in a totally different tone. She also dabbles in some classical material, notorious for its innumerable orchestrated layers. The fact that Elledge can take something as complex as Gnossienne No. 1 and revert it to its bare structural form (and yet retain its recognition) is inspiring and, well, unbelievable.

I am a strong believer that a cover should not really exist unless it is doing something really new and fresh with the material provided. With that, Elledge could quite possibly be the best cover artist of the last decade. Her accordion, an instrument of unparalleled non-recognition in mainstream music, could very well be the outlet for a groundbreaking new musical path.

#buskers #Turntable