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With synergy so perfect you wonder if Guy and the boys have had a quiet word with Mother Nature herself, Bury’s finest return to coincide with a much-welcomed early flowering of spring. As ever since making small waves with delicate, tender offerings like ‘Newborn’, the quintet’s lovingly crafted music seems to sit best with the season of new beginnings.
And like the season itself, frontman Guy Garvey finds himself on the threshold of a new beginning.
Turning 40 last weekend, he himself confirmed the record documents ‘some of the big and little, positive and negative, life experiences that any group of men approaching forty can expect’. The record is full of reflections, hope and lament beautifully soundtracked by a wash of layered strings, brass and percussion.
Opener ‘This Blue World’ gets things off to a typically contemplative start, gently ushering the long-player in a clutch of wonderings about the scope of the world and our role in it. ‘Charge’, first aired on their last tour in the winter of 2012, could quite easily fit snuggly on their breakthrough album The Seldom Seen Kid, a less urgent, but equally striking cousin of Grounds For Divorce.
Elsewhere, the single which has earned hearty thanks from Mrs Lennon due to a noble name check for Yoko, 'New York Morning' is everything Elbow do so beautifully. Pieced together with such love and care, it builds and builds to a wonderful crescendo as Garvey praises the city he escaped to to re-group after he broke up with his long-term girlfriend.
Recorded largely at their home from home, Salford’s Blueprint Studios, and once again produced by keyboardist Craig Potter – the record blends the multi-textual moments which peppered their first three albums, with the kind of melodic hooks, which vociferously grab radio pluggers attentions. None more so on the album’s standout moment, the Shakespearian-inspired 'My Sad Captains'. A booze-drenched ode to the passing of time and his much-fabled drinking partners, it’s utterly gorgeous and sent this listener’s mind flashing back to his own all-day sessions with schools pals of 25 years standing – ‘another sunrise with my sad captains, with whom I choose to lose my mind’.
Penned by bassist Pete Turner using iPad apps, 'Colour Fields' dances across a low-key electronic beat at a jaunty pace, documenting the comings and goings of a mystery girl.
The only track the record really lets itself down on slightly, is its title one – Garvey’s voice is lost in the mix somewhat and it lacks the subtle power of the rest of the release.
Thankfully, album closer The Blanket of the Night, a reported political statement about the treatment of refugees in this country, although a strange choice to finish the record – sees Elbow moving in much more murkier waters and a refreshing departure it is too.
With an arena UK tour pencilled in for April, the record certainly whets the appetite for how these tracks will be recreated live – musically, they’ve always been one of our strongest live performers and in Garvey they possess arguably our most striking lyricists, this record has only strengthened the case for this argument.
This new chapter in Elbow’s existence is looking like a page-turner already.
