Reviews

Elbow – Leaders Of The Free World

Elbow’s third album is sorrowful without descending into outright misery.

2005

From the Archive

Review by Ben Stroud

Originally published 15 October 2005.

Elbow have never been a band that have encountered a great deal of luck in their career. In fact, I think they actually must revel in going about things The Hard Way: the aborted first major label contract, the resulting two years spent in the doldrums before getting the opportunity to set out their particular shop stocked with elegiac shuffle pop with their tremendous debut album, 2001’s Mercury Prize-nominated Asleep In The Back. And then, as if it had all been a dream, things started to go wrong for them again. Second album Cast Of Thousands fared well critically, but people weren’t buying it (in more ways than one), and for all of the compliments heaped upon Guy Garvey and his less-then-merry men, the album tanked commercially. But could this be a good thing? After all, we all know how fat and complacent bands can become after enough unfettered praise and commercial adulation to power a hot air balloon full of praise to the moon. It has certainly destroyed bigger acts than Elbow, so why should we expect anything less than a glorious failure from Bury’s finest? Well, why not?

From the opening, hushed stomp of “Station Approach,” which describes how it feels to go through the decompression of coming off of a gruelling tour schedule for an album that very few got and even fewer purchased (‘The streets are full of Goths and Greeks/I haven’t seen my mum for weeks’) through to the Voodoo sound system opening of third track and first single “Forget Myself,” mournful and often quite bleak lyrics are intermingled with moments of pop brilliance that Thom Yorke stupidly gave up a long time ago to go and play with synths like a value-brand Aphex Twin.

But the beauty on Leaders Of The Free World comes not just from the music, the lyrics, the sheer intensity of it all. No, the feeling goes much deeper than that. Rather than making an album full of affected, posturing indie pop songs that provide nothing more than a soundtrack to your Friday night pre-pub/club routine, Guy Garvey has woven an aural patchwork that is affecting, beautiful and unashamedly in love with the ups and downs of normal everyday life. From fretting about the state of the world as you sit helpless in front of the television set (“Leaders Of The Free World”), to lamenting the loss of someone you’ve never even met (“An Imagined Affair”), the album manages to marry even the most awkward of bedfellows: whimsy and pragmatism. Cold comfort with the central heating turned up to full. Real life, in other words.

Endearingly sorrowful without descending into outright misery, Leaders Of The Free World is exactly what we the listeners should expect from a band’s third album. By taking the mundane, the everyday and the tragic and knitting them into a shimmering, heart-warming and ultimately beautiful musical patchwork, Elbow have produced an album that will stay with you long after it’s left your stereo. Proof positive that you don’t need a hot air balloon full of praise to carry you skyward; you just need the songs, the talent and the spirit, and Elbow have all three of these qualities in spades.

Leaders Of The Free World was released on 12 September 2005 via V2.