Vocalists who turn towards using the voice “as an instrument” tend to sacrifice enunciation in the process, slurring across consonants and mutating vowel sounds in the search for some form of pure, wordless musical expression. This tendency is starkly inverted by David Fitzpatrick, who records under the moniker Les Étoiles. His idiosyncratic vocal production, in which sparing, poetically concentrated lyrics are enunciated stress-by-stress, is as distinctive in its own way as Thom Yorke’s or Scott Walker’s. Framed by pointillist arrangements of piano, guitar, bass and minimal percussion, the effect is warm without becoming enveloping, intimate like a squeeze of the hand.

To Leave A Mark, Fitzpatrick’s latest release on Records on Ribs, is a collection of short pieces (they have the feeling of being compositions, Lieder rather than “songs” in the familiar verse-chorus-middle-eight-break sense) about the peculiar sort of homesickness induced by actually being back at home, the satisfactions and longeurs of rustication. The opening track, “The Lookout”, announces: “for a slowly-passing hour, / looking down towards the river, / nothing’s missing / nothing’s missing”. A tremor of mortality runs through the realization that the place you used to call home remains complete, replete in itself, without you in it. It has an enduring integrity, quite indifferent to the personal drama of individuals’ departure and return. “Taken by the breeze” says as much: “if your ashes could be scattered here / you would become a part of it, / taken by the breeze”. To “become a part” of a place, to lose one’s separate identity and be dissipated and absorbed within it, is not yet to “leave a mark” on it. Is this a meaningful ambition?

“Home” for Fitzpatrick is Bridgnorth in Shropshire, and the inevitable reference (in “From High Rock”) to “blue remembered hills” invokes a literary tradition that runs from Housman through Dennis Potter, in which pastoral reflections on place and landscape are yoked to biographical and existential concerns. Potter’s “Forest of Nead”, the cryptic Forest of Dean of memory, is a fictive topos, a real place remade in imagination, and one that has become a palimpsest of scenes and occasions: a ghost wood whose trails and thickets are tangled up with those of the writer’s child-self. Like others of his generation – Alan Garner, Geoffrey Hill – who grew up in “the country” and left it for university, Potter invests the landscape of his childhood with a kind of presiding spiritual presence: a larger consciousness, belonging to the place itself, which is able to unify the layered traces of human experience within it. A repeated motif in To Leave a Mark is a backing vocal chorus chanting “home”, which almost seems to ventriloquise this presence. Is the speaker in “The Lookout” observing the “two sandstone landmarks / that have now become quite precious”, or are they observing him?

The theme most obliquely treated within the pastoral of To Leave a Mark is that of class and social mobility, in particular the social displacement effected by higher education. The poet and critic Sean O’Brien once remarked of Geoffrey Hill’s poetically-imagined home country that it seemed to be an “England where nobody lives”. Fitzpatrick’s Bridgnorth is similarly peopled by ghosts: expectations of encounters that do not materialize, fleeting impressions of people long-gone. What about those who never left (and, in particular, those who never left to go to university)? They seem to become, anonymously, part of the place itself, held in its keeping. “No Such Things” begins: “It was fair and fitting / we had fled our hometown / we were kept too long”, but turns on this word “kept”, shifting the sense from one of detention to one of protective enclosure: “I came back here / to be kept”. What is perhaps remarkable is the song’s conclusion: “It is not progression / it is not regression / there are no such things”. One flees in the belief that there are indeed such things, that getting out and away means progress. Only later is it possible to see this flight as “fair and fitting”, part of a larger social pattern, rather than as spectacular escape and betrayal. (The question of how “fair” that social pattern really is may remain in the background for now, but can only be properly addressed when the pattern becomes visible as such).

This shift in perspective is not reversible, but it is also not total. “Diminishing Returns” concludes quite starkly: “we cannot suspend belief”: the place still has a hold, and one remains, irredeemably, the person whose growth was bounded by it. If social displacement produces an anxiety about one’s ability to leave a mark on the home one has left, there is also a corresponding anxiety about bearing the marks it has left on you into the wider world: a regional accent, say, or more likely the slightly heightened, over-careful RP of those whose accents have been effaced by ambition and education. For Fitzpatrick, the recurring question is one of recognition: who will know me as I am, and remember me as I was? “Will there be a face, a name”?

To Leave A Mark is not only beautiful and haunting, but also knowing in a way that may unsettle listeners who are really paying attention: these are Fitzpatrick’s “songs of experience”, and the awareness concentrated in them gives out onto great and searching questions about mortality and identity. The sense of longing amply communicated by Fitzpatrick’s langorously precise voice and limpid arrangements coincides with a more elusive, restless anxiety, which a lyric like “The Clearing” settles but cannot expunge: “bad memories / scattered as the seeds…notions / that cannot blossom”. There is a life’s work in there somewhere.

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