Elbow lack certain qualities You tend to when you’re out on your own, or perhaps because you’re on your own. Which they are. Seldom are bands so alone in fact, devoid of ties to any noticeable trend, and with a clear absence of competitive trailblazing, generic identification markings or noticeably erect egos.
They’re intrinsically affixed to their home city of Manchester, sure, it defines them on this album more than ever before, but behavioral colloquialisms and a blunt but expressive reality carry more weight in that respect than the usual musical heritage. The point is that with this, their third and probably best album so far, they have proven themselves to be a rarity amongst recording artists. They are a band who make albums that could only ever have been made by one band at any one time in their life. And they’re a band who steadily keep getting better.
It is hard to talk like that with Elbow though, you’re certain they can’t have eclipsed acclaimed highlights from the last 5 years; ‘Newborn’, ‘Switching Off’ and the incomparably colossal ‘Grace Under Pressure’ to name a convenient trio. And you’d be right. But if their intention, when they set up their own space in Manchester’s Blueprint Studios to spend a year forming this album and accompanying DVD, was to make a record that sounded like it was recorded between the same four walls, to suggest an accomplished sense of stylistic belonging, then they have succeeded. ‘Asleep In the Back’ for its varied but high strike rate sounded like an EP anthology and ‘Cast Of Thousands’ raised the production bar and reigned things in, but ‘Leaders Of The Free World’ has a real cohesion that has evaded them previously.
There is little here you won’t already seem familiar, from the gathering momentum of the eventually immense ‘Station Approach’ (a recovering-despondent relation to ‘Ribcage’ and almost a microcosm of their entire existence in itself) to lonely isolated ballad ‘Puncture Repair’. It’s Elbow as you know them, condensed, refined, then split like a ripe nucleus. If there’s a noticeable stride forward though, and arguably there is, it’s all about pace and awareness of themselves.
It’s the one triumvirate of tracks in particular – chiming first single ‘Forget Myself’, the dirty political jumpstart-your-heart glam grind of the title track, and the awesome ‘Mexican Standoff’, sounding like Radiohead’s ‘National Anthem’ sunburnt with its trousers rolled up, gone mariachi – that stand like newly carved granite plinths, off which the more fragile tracks are hung like flickering fairy-lights. If there is one complaint, it’s that after mastering that slalom successfully, the final four tracks slow to a meander. Their quality is unquestionable, the detail in ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘The Everthere’ confirm a wide, patient and expanding palette, but the urgency that made the first part of the album so vital noticeably evaporates. It does however become less and less of a grievance the longer you live with the album.
If you’re still hungry for inspiration, even after all the acute arrangements and stacked emotions, you should go out of your way to obtain the DVD edition. It’s a format already exploited by bands aplenty, none more so than the Super Furries, but one that’s rarely amounted to much more than a surround sound ‘n’ screensaver package. By inviting brilliant Manc media artists the Soup Collective into their studio with them, to work together and in tandem, they’ve bucked this trend and given birth to a unique, satisfying and complete extension to the record. It’s part documentary, part artistic joyride, part entire extra limb.
When it really works, like on the immense beat-led nightmare animation sequence for ‘Picky Bugger/McGregor’, the inanimate-awakening elegance of ‘The Stops’ and the colourful jerking inter-city pile-up of ‘Station Approach’, it’s like you’re being led by hand through the songs inner workings, aspects magnified, attentions focused. The musical equivalent of hopping in a dinghy down the chocolate canal in Wonka’s chocolate factory. It’s quite an achievement and a crying shame that it can’t accompany every copy by default.
But the album alone should be enough for even those with the greatest expectations. From Guy Garvey’s abundant, attuned, dry poetic verse, to both the barren subtlety and striking impact of the musicianship, and the deep emotional ability afforded to them by their careful, creative songwriting. The title of the record might be a product of the blunt humour that’s always running just below surface level with Elbow, but it’s no joke that they’re way ahead of the pack and certainly the first to plant this flag.