7/10
With his transportive new EP 'Past Lives', Maryland’s Eli Lev opens a family photo album and lets the voices step out, sing, and stay awhile. As the second chapter of his Three Worlds Project, following 'Present Journey', this collection is a living tribute to lineage; melding oral history, gentle folk textures, and the enduring pull of personal memory.
Where many singer-songwriters draw from imagination, Lev goes straight to the source. The EP features audio from his own relatives, such as Bubbe Sarah recalling her birth in 1892 Poland, Uncle Ben’s recollections of mill work in the American South, and others, all woven seamlessly between songs.
Opener 'Echo' acts like a threshold, inviting us to wade into generational waters where time ripples outward in all directions. From there, the release unfolds like a personal archive. On 'Where We Come From', Lev marries Appalachian twang with Jewish diasporic threads, crafting a song that feels at once rooted and migratory, an anthem for anyone trying to trace their way back to somewhere.
'My Wish Was You' offers a moment of levity tinged with loss, while 'Who I Was”'blurs identities across eras. But Lev doesn’t simply sing about his ancestors, he becomes them by adopting their voices, their dreams, their heartbreaks, as extensions of his own. It’s ambitious, but it never veers into performance. This is kinship as art, intimacy as arrangement.
Perhaps the EP’s most emotionally resonant piece is closer 'Our Friends', which acts as a musical eulogy for those no longer living, but still deeply felt.
The production is warm and minimal, allowing Lev’s lyrics and the archival recordings to shine. There’s no studio gloss to hide behind, just acoustic guitars, ambient layers, and the occasional breath between lines. It’s a restrained approach that lets the humanity take centre stage.
With 'Past Lives', Eli Lev has made an EP that’s both deeply personal and strikingly universal. It’s a collection that honours what came before without becoming trapped in it, a bridge between generations, built one story, one song at a time.
Eli Lev's new EP 'Past Lives' will be available from the 8th October.
