Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Making Elbow Room




Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid (2008)


It's lamentable that I discovered The Seldom Seen Kid so late in the year, as it certainly belongs on my top 10 list. Elbow, a soft spoken English septet, released this as their fourth album in March of 2008, and garnered plenty of praise for their work. The record won the prestigious Mercury Prize, a British award delivered to the "best album of the year." This classification results from the deliberations of the country's top executive record producers. While this sounds like a variation of the Grammy's, I can promise that the prize winner is rarely as crappy as its American cousins. The lavish attention for The Seldom Seen Kid is well deserved, as it proves to be a fantastic distraction from the majority of the mess popular music has evolved into.

The Seldom Seen Kid's sound embodies lushness. Elbow finds themselves somewhere between Coldplay and Radiohead, their popular countrymen, utilizing a soft and progressive sound with moody undertones. The record's beginning is peculiar, as it nearly alienates the listener. It opens on simple and smooth music, and then suddenly explodes into huge and out of place chord of perverse noise. This induces aversion. The phrase repeats, and the jarring noise offends a second time. The phrase lines up for its third iteration, and anyone listening braces themselves for the awful punishment to follow. But it never comes. Instead, astonishment results, and the ears are saturated in Guy Garvey's rich voice. I make no understatement, when I proclaim that Garvey's voice is absolutely beautiful. Were Elbow to ever break up, I would demand a long and successful solo career, as his voice is one to go the distance.

There are no roman numerals to be found in The Seldom Seen Kid's song titles, nor is there particularly dexterous playing to be heard from track to track, but that's not to discount the disc's mildly proggy vibe. The ebb and flow of the disc feels like it's advancing some unknowable plot, always the sign of a well sequenced disc but also the bridge between songs like the lovely "Mirrorball" and the bluesy (in the get-the-Led-out sense) "Grounds for Divorce". There, the song's lyrical and musical reputation are in keeping with the band's exploration of the static as well as blues traditions. It's a tragic drinking song where the protagonist loses himself in "a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall." Less fancy-pants lyricists would have just said "bar," but Garvey knows the value of a poetic line or two. In typically ornate Garvey fashion, he's called "An Audience with the Pope" "a Bond theme if Bond was from Bury and a recovering Catholic," but he could have just described it as Tom Waits doing 007.

The album is a long one, but tracks flow together seamlessly. Its contents never grow dull, again largely due to Garvey's lyrics. His wordplay proves extremely amusing and represents fine stand-alone work. But his work is not alone, as it shares the company of beautiful music. What more can you ask for?