The Take Off And
Landing Of Everything – Elbow
The unique career of Elbow is elegant testament to the
impact, or non-impact, of a couple of larger-than-life songs on an otherwise
unassuming indie rock career. The band
released a debut album in 2001. Seven
long years and two more interesting albums later, they released The Seldom Seen Kid, which included two
of 2008’s greatest songs: “Grounds For
Divorce” and “One Day Like This.” The
former was every inch a drunken swaggering piss-take through a week’s worth of
lousy poetry lines, in which even the handclaps were made to sound outrageous;
the latter was as perfect a celebration of a perfect day as a bunch of mumbling
lads could ever hope to make. It was a
gorgeous epic. And it was a hit.
Popularity and acclaim, including major industry awards,
ensued. The career of Elbow had reached
a natural joint of pivot. The band had
spent three prior albums being incorrigibly endearing and odd. An
inordinate number of their songs, while pretty to listen to, seemed to go absolutely
nowhere while taking a while getting there.
Many were defiantly, steadfastly quiet, erupting in louder volumes only
when it was most jarring and obnoxious. And then, two magical songs later, a seat at
the head table seemed on offer. Elbow
appeared poised to become a bashful version of Coldplay.
We are now two full albums removed from “One Day Like This,”
and all indications are that there has been, in fact, no pivot in the Elbow
career. This latest album The Take Off And Landing Of Everything, like
2011’s Build A Rocket Boys! seems
much more like the lovely offspring of pre-fame Elbow than any new bloated construct
of expanding stature. Even though the
fame is probably never going away, Elbow appear devotedly returned to a career
spent being quiet and weird.
First things first:
this band knows its way around a recording studio. There are very few instruments or notes out
of place here. There are no unforced
errors. There is also no rush. Seven of these ten songs clock in at a regal
five minutes or longer, and five of them break the six-minute mark. Five different six-minute (or longer)
songs! It doesn’t leave much time for
Netflix.
As per custom, there is also a scarcity premium on loudness
and dynamics. Guy Garvey’s wonderful
voice can croon and soar, and it takes flight on a few separate occasions on The Take Off And Landing Of Everything,
but the overwhelming—and under said title, tiny bit ironic—impression of the
album is of a craft at cruising altitude.
This is elite-level excellence.
It is accomplishment without much noticeable sweat. Sonically, this works out to something like a
softer, wordier, more complex and less apocalyptic version of The
National.
The proceedings edge into motion with “This Blue World,” a
delicate and profoundly unhurried meditation spanning a full seven minutes and
including a full-stop change of movement at the four-and-a-half minute
mark. Everything is so perfectly well
placed and performed here that the song never betrays its actual length. The subject matter is love, longing, and separation,
and it might very well have been written in seat 17F for how many references
there are to windows and travel. And
yet, for all of the mature finishing touches on “This Blue World,” the old
Elbow adolescent smirk remains intact.
To wit, the final lyric:
While three
chambers of my heart
Beat true and strong with love for
another,
The fourth is yours forever.
The deliberate shuffling and grooving continues through the
follow-up track and on into another two-act song with “Fly Boy Blue / Lunette” at
the #3 spot. It is right about here—when
the beautiful first part of this track morphs into the beautiful second
part—that the listener realizes something to the effect of, “I could listen to
this band and this album forever.” Which
is fortunate, actually, because variations from the mean tempo and volume on
this album are spare. There really are no rockers among the album’s
ten songs: there are a few that skew
louder, but all of them move with the pace of grazing pachyderms. The lyrics just keep coming, many of them
clever, all of them arriving compliments of Garvey’s two-shot-neat voice.
But the loudness merits review. Track 7 “My Sad Captains” boasts an
impeccable combination of jousty electric guitar, pacing trumpet, multi-tracked
background vocals, and a loping drumbeat.
That would be enough, really, but the picture develops further with some
wonderful keyboard noodling and a chorus that is absolutely boomed from atop
the parapets. There may not be a ton of
speed work on The Take Off And Landing Of
Everything, but my goodness, does the internal volume control work wonders
when it needs to. “Another sunrise with
my sad captains / with whom I choose to lose my mind.”
We are losing ours, to bliss. It is just stunning. As the song adds, “what a perfect waste of
time.”
And then: a
masterstroke of a title track. The
background of the song is completely and totally brim-full of outstanding
noise: squalling guitar in the manner of
alarm sirens, and a rhythm section bent on world domination. It doesn’t rock, necessarily, but it thunders
forth like a message from the gods. The
song won’t allow us to leave this album with anything other than respectful
silence. Nothing on here sounds less
than skillful, and the flourishes—precious in their rarity—are transcendent.
It is unfortunately too easy for fans of more obscure rock
bands to lapse into a kind of antagonistic fandom: almost rooting against fame (mainly) and
fortune (kind of) for one’s favorite bands because we worry it will pollute or
corrupt their genius, or deflate the creative pressures previously responsible
for greatness. We can begin to assume
that every beloved band is an Icarus-in-waiting, and we become shrill about
calling out warnings and instructions regarding how close the Sun might be.
The more balanced way to express these sentiments, and one which
reflects more charitably upon aficionados everywhere, is this: we just want those who are great at this to
remain great at it, come hell, high water, beautiful groupies or asshole
Company Men. If artistic greatness is a
feat of balance, we pray for their steady hands.
Elbow have taken off and landed a great number of planes at
this point. They have flown at least two
of them very close to the Sun. It is
2014 now, and everything continues to function just fine. Better than ever, actually. Prayers answered.
Keepers 1-10
May 2014
