Q Review

Elbow – Build A Rocket Boys! ****

Steady as she goes for Band of the People’s fifth album.

"You can't beat a bit of Elbow to raise the spirits." That was the view of Leanne Cee, and dozens of other sports fans, when it was announced the band's One Day Like This had been chosen to soundtrack England’s 2018 World Cup bid. Its rousing “It’s looking like a beautiful day” chorus was “the perfect choice” to “melt the hearts of the FA committee”, reckoned the people of Twitter. The Sun and the Mirror agreed and were quickly on the phone to Elbow’s people. You can see their thinking: dyed-in-the-wool Mancunians, and recently appointed People’s band, helping bring football home. The synergy was perfect. Except for one thing: no one in Elbow actually likes football.
As it turned out, we lost. Still, the story suggests several things. One: Not everyone in the Manchester area likes football. Two: After 20 years of toil, Elbow’s music was now connecting on a Coldplay scale. And three: What a grounded place the band themselves must be in. “Use our song if you like,” they presumably said to FIFA, just as they had to Big Brother 9, So You Think you Can Dance Canada and even James May At The Edge Of Space. There’s no point being precious about it.
It’s hard to imagine similar sentiment coming from Elbow Around the time of 2003’s Cast Of Thousands. Still reeling from being mucked around by various record companies and rattled when their eventual debut, Asleep In The Back, lost the Mercury Prize to PJ Harvey in 2001, they made a record even singer Guy Garvey called “unsettling” and “jagged”. Recorded under pressure, at a time when the song cupboard was empty – something not helped by Garvey losing all his notebooks – it was the sound of a band that still felt they had a lot to prove. Like similar acts by Radiohead and U2, Cast Of Thousands seemed conceived to position Elbow against the mainstream. If the net result alienated some earlier fans, so be it. By 2008’s The Seldom Seen Kid all that had changed. Older, with 3/5 of the band now fathers and at peace with the level of their success (big enough, not massive), they were in a comfortable enough place to write something as universal as One Day Like This. For every band deemed not popular enough to be allowed to continue past album two or three, it’s a lesson in what might be.

Its obvious the good grounding is still there on Build A Rocket Boys! The two Ivor Novello’s, the Brit, the Mercury Prize (second time lucky) and the platinum sales that came with The Seldom Seen kid – plus Garvey no longer being able to walk down Manchester’s Deansgate without a bobby getting off his bike to shake his hand - might have once sent Elbow into a tailspin. But Build A Rocket Boys” isn’t a reaction to anything. It’s neither Top 5-be-damned experimental noise terror nor 11 string-soaked attempts to rewrite One Day Like This. It’s simply another excellent Elbow record.
Written while touring, recorded at Salford’s Blueprint Studios, and produced and mixed by keyboardist Craig Potter, it’s an album that maximises the use of light and shade, texture and mood, in contrast to The Seldom Seen Kid’s autumnal melancholy.
Garvey has already spoken about the first song Lippy Kids, inspired by “getting really annoyed when kids are demonised in the press” and how teenage years are “an amazingly important time”. “Do they know those days are golden?” he croons. “Walking on walls/stealing booze and hour-long hungry kisses”; the atmosphere of warm nostalgia completed by swelling choir and simply twinkling guitar. The Birds sees Garvey heralding “the keepers of our secrets” over cranks percussion that recalls Grounds For Divorce, before strings and Potter’s electronic bleeps and chirrups send it somewhere completely different.
With Love shows Garvey has been soaking up all those contemporary sounds on his 6music radio show, with a not do dubstep’s empty spaces that makes effective use of handclaps, piano strings and the Hallé Youth Choir to carry its “love will find you out” message. Neat Little Rows (“lay my bones in neat little rows!”) and Open Arms are big beery sing-a-longs that will be well served by this month’s first arena tour, the latter reprising the childhood theme: “The you are will know the boy you were”. Subtler and stranger are High Ideals (with its cryptic talk of bayonet, sinew and wedding rings) and The River, which drifts by on piano that recalls Brian Eno’s Another Green World.

Nobody does serious music like Elbow do, bas as anyone who knows their cover of Destiny Child’s Independent Woman pt. 1 – all xylophone, skiffle beat and the gravelly northern accents – will attest, they’re hardly humourless. A 90-second The Birds reprise, with a Coronation Street extra friend doing his best Sir John Gielgud, is just daft. By comparison, Dear Friends will floor anyone who chokes during the couplet, “So, gentle shoulder charge/Love you, mate” on The Seldom Seen Kid’s Friend Of Ours. It’s another left-handed closing-time male torch song at which its authors are possibly unique. Leanne Cee wasn’t wrong. You can’t beat a bit of Elbow to raise the spirits.

Download: Lippy Kids//The Birds//Neat Little Rows//Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl

I love you Hatty .

Nice one Hatster - the album sounds great - more of the same by the sounds of it.....reckon it'll be a grower, rather than something more immediate like TSSK.

Splendid stuff.......(wanders off to MBV's local Asda to buy a copy).

No problem
it gave me something to do in my spare time

no im pretty sure you can't.
i think they're just Q's recommendations of the best tracks on the album

much appreciated -the full review does sound far more positive than the
quote on the other thread.

Just reading the mag now - it's 'like this ? try this...' compares it to...

Last Broadcast - Doves
Another Green World - Brian Eno
Laughing Stock - Talk Talk

With a new pic starring Dave Gro..oh it's Craig !

Niiice! Thanks so much Hatty! That review gives me a lot to look forward to - not that I wasn't already looking forward to it, of course! But the details are great, and it all makes me even more impatient to hear the whole thing.

Thanks, Hatty! Sounds like the kind of album I would want from Elbow after TSSK.

Thanks for posting Hatty!
It sounds wonderful!
Sometimes wish I was a Q reviewer...

Oh... goose bumps... where have you been! :-)

thanx for that... good read.