Album Review: Elbow - Build a rocket boys!

When Elbow won the Mercury Music Prize for 2008’s wonderful The Seldom Seen Kid, the entire room leapt to its feet and threw their arms in the air – it was the sort of scene you’d expect at a sporting occasion rather than a music biz awards show. But the reasons why it happened were reasonable enough: it was the right winner for starters, but more than that, there was a sense that here was a band who really deserved the award. Not only were they terribly nice guys, but Elbow’s beautifully crafted music, which had always inspired a devoted following, had long since merited this sort of wider exposure. This was the Mercury Music Prize at its best: giving a band who had slogged it out in a sort of netherworld between success and failure for years the little push they need to reach a whole new audience. For those who knew the reality, that Elbow had always been brilliant, right back to 2001’s Asleep in the Back, there was even greater satisfaction at the result.

And so for the follow-up - build a rocket boys! - we have, for the first time, a weight of expectation on an Elbow record. Thankfully, they haven’t tried to write a dozen versions of ‘One Day Like This’, and nor have they sought to alienate their new fanbase with any anti-fame posturing. They’ve done the sensible thing – they’ve made another great Elbow record. It’s every bit as elegant and nuanced as its predecessor, and of course there’s still room for touches of woozy prog-rock (keep an ear out for the keyboard solo on opener ‘The Birds’).

As with all Elbow albums, it’s built around a particular theme; it’s all about that awkward inbetweener age between youth and adulthood.  The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys have penned great albums on the topic, but here the time Guy Garvey is writing about has long since passed, and the result is both poignant and heartbreaking. “Do they know those days are golden?” he asks on ‘Lippy Kids’, the album’s magnificent centrepiece, as he recalls his own teenage years of “stealing booze and hour-long hungry kisses”. On ‘Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl’, he writes from the perspective of his 20-year-old self, and the magic is in the details he picks out, the one fresh heartbreak he ‘celebrates and mourns’ and the ‘single yellow duvet’ and ‘single switch to flick’ of his one-room apartment. A terrific writer and blessed with one of the saddest voices around, Garvey is always affecting but manages to avoid tipping into sentimentality.

Famously devoted to the long-album format (they have tried to stop their songs being bought individually on iTunes), Elbow have always sought to make music to be swallowed whole, to be treasured and loved. Music built for the long haul. In build a rocket boys! they have produced a fifth such record, one that both long-standing fans and recent converts will have every reason to cherish.