7/10

There's something fitting about Eli Wise returning to music with an EP concerned with transition. 'Ghosts and Logic' may run for just over ten minutes, but its three songs carry the perspective of someone who has spent years away from songwriting and returned with a much clearer understanding of why creating matters.

That makes opener ‘Everyone Goes Through Something Like This, But That Doesn’t Help’ an unexpectedly effective introduction. Its premise of losing creative work to a computer crash could easily become little more than an amusing songwriter’s complaint, but he manages to find something broader within it. The frustration of seeing hours of work disappear becomes a small existential crisis, approached with the wit and observational detail that runs throughout the EP.

‘Out In The Cold’ expands the scale considerably. Framing political conflict through a playful, almost science-fiction lens, he gives the song more forward momentum while retaining the conversational character of his writing. It demonstrates one of the EP's strongest qualities: serious ideas are allowed to remain serious without requiring relentlessly sombre music around them.

Then the emotional heart comes with ‘I Had To Choose’. His journey back towards music is inseparable from rediscovering his voice after transitioning, and the closing track places that experience within a wider meditation on self-definition and change. And its relatively concise runtime only strengthens its directness.

Musically, Wise sits comfortably within melodic indie pop and singer-songwriter territory. The finely picked guitar work and crisp vocals give the songs an intimacy reminiscent of Paul Simon, while the combination of lyrical eccentricity and vulnerability brings shades of The Shins and Amanda Palmer without feeling beholden to any of them.

But what makes 'Ghosts and Logic' especially engaging is its lack of grandiosity. After almost a decade away, he offers three carefully written songs about frustration, change and learning to exist more comfortably in the present.

Concise, intelligent and life-affirming, 'Ghosts and Logic' is less about Eli Wise picking up where he left off than discovering what songwriting can mean to him now.