Elbow have subtly reinvented themselves so many times that they’re now journeying far from their rocky guitar roots. Their 10th album features bubbling synths, playful orchestrations, African-inspired rhythms and what vocalist Guy Garvey has called “seedy, gnarly grooves”. The particularly innovative Lovers’ Leap races through samba-style percussion, darting strings and a rolling bass line, before an electronic glam stomp leads into a gorgeously Beatles-y coda. The lyrics, meanwhile, are a darkly humorous rumination on how we romanticise tragic youth.
Elsewhere, the playful Balu is driven by horns and a Wurlitzer-style keyboard melody while the more turbulent Good Blood Mexico City has something of the National at their most epic and dramatic. Her to the Earth nods to, of all things, Genesis’s That’s All, but Very Heaven flips the dial again: it’s one of the most wistful, haunting songs they’ve done.
Garvey tackles a diversity of topics, from the welfare state to memories of teenage wildness, with some razor-sharp writing. On success, he sings: “I haven’t paid for cabs or beers / Or met a cunt in 20 years / Like all that outrun poverty / All I have was coming to me.” The superb Knife Fight, meanwhile, is based on an incident he witnessed in a cafe in Istanbul. The singer is forever finding new ways to use his voice. He experiments with texture and even puts it through a vocoder but, for all Elbow’s adventures, the foundations are still classy songwriting, heart and soul.
