Album Review :: Elbow - The Take Off And Landing Of Everything

Elbow

The Take Off And Landing Of Everything

March 10 2014 (Fiction)

8/10

Words: Alison Mack


Over the course of their 20-odd years and six albums together, Elbow have become as much a Northern institution as Coronation Street. They may no longer be exactly the sprightly callow youths of old, but in approaching middle years they have taken their roots and the path that leads from the Manchester 'burbs, to produce on this latest album, a tread not stamped with clog marks, but with sensitive steps through the life choices of  relationships, family, heartbreak, change, and those aspects which build the bones of both man and song.

In Guy Garvey there is a raging lyricist who can deftly and poetically craft a line here or there that conveys far more in a simple sentence that would take others a whole work to equate similar. "I’m pouring oil in double time upon the troubled rising tide inside of me",  relates the man who saw his 10-year relationship end during the making of the album. "I am the boy who loved her so in every song".

Indeed, Garvey says the album title itself refers to the many events and upheavals not just he, but other mlbsbd members too, have been through: marriages, break-ups, births, bereavements; tackling "some of the big and little, positive and negative, lif experiences that any group of men approaching 40 can expect."

Opener 'This Blue World' takes seven minutes to set the scene and tug at your heartstrings in its tender projection encompassing lines such as "While three chambers of my heart beat true and strong with love for another, the fourth is yours forever - " which perhaps echoes most their Asleep At The Back debut.

'Charge', as its title may suggest, strikes a more aggressive approach, with Garvey delivering "Glory be, these fuckers are ignoring me, I'm from another century" to an electro beat and hooky organ.

The blues-riddled 'Fly Boy Blue/Lunette' with its sax grooves, takes a wry Northern humour dig at the Government, with an MP described as "a chinless prefect, gone Godzilla", and where Garvey’s vocal is multi-tracked in partnership with horns and electric guitar; whilst earlier single release, the big styled ‘New York Morning’ - which features former Doves' Jimi Goodwin - is Garvey’s ‘love letter to a city other than Manchester' and where "folk are nice to Yoko". The album's second half is largely ruled by the seven-minute title track that rather sums up the work as a fitting flight and settling of all things in place.

Elbow will not displease any of their long-standing fanbase with 'The Take Off And Landing Of Everything', and there is more than enough contained here to draw in a new listening audience. Grim up North? Don't you believe it.