Seldom seen brilliance
“She has the sweetest darkest side. And when it comes into her eyes I know iron and steel couldn’t hold me.” From An Audience With The Pope from the album The Seldom Seen Kid by Elbow.
Elbow have largely flown under my radar, acquiring an accretion of awards and celebrity plaudits as they flew by. Both the Brits and Mercury music prizes have landed on their collective mantlepiece and despite looking like a young, straight Stephen Fry, Guy Garvey has delivered on his promise to add to their predominantly female fan-base. With the release of “The Seldom Seen Kid” and their introduction to my car stereo, they have a male fan too.
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They’ve been around for a while – forming in 1990 as Mr Soft – as wrong a title as you could possibly contrive without assistance. Rock bands are never soft, particularly “alternative” rock bands and that’s where Elbow have pitched their tent. To their credit, they realised the error of their ways and thanks to Denis Potter and the character Philip Marlow, from his mini-series “The Singing Detective”, they switched to Elbow, which according to Marlow is; “the most sensuous word in the English language”, not for its definition, but instead for the way you feel when you say it. I’ve been reliably informed, the inside of the elbow, the crook, is very sensuous anyway. I’ll get back to you on that one once the research has been done.
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The Seldom Seen Kid, is the latest of four albums from the band, released in March 2008. Preceding it were: Asleep in the back, Cast of thousands, and Leaders of the free world. The progression in skill, both in terms of song writing strengths, and production are clearly illustrated if you listen to each of the albums in succession. They are now at the peak of their powers and it really does show, because there is scarcely a track on the album that isn’t of the highest of standards.
Stephen Fry fronting his band
Seldom has been out a year now and popped into the charts briefly at number 5, the highest placing of the band’s career so far, but critically they made it into the mainstream with advert features like the “Left 4 Dead” video game, the Coen Brothers movie “Burn After Reading”, the BBC TV motoring series Top Gear and the adverts for the film “The Soloist”. They also provided the background music for the BBC’s coverage of the 2008 Olympics with an instrumental version of the anthem “One Day Like This”.
The lyrical core of the album sees Garvey address the key questions of life with the big themes of love and loss becoming the central focus. That’s what their press release says anyway. I think they’re not far away from the truth in this respect. There’s an adult feel to the music, it appeals to the intellect as much as the instinctual and sensual. They’re all getting on a bit now – mid thirties – so perhaps they deserve to achieve elder statesman status with this release and, I guess, allowed a few stray wanderings into the derivative like: “The Bones Of You”, which could have been released by Led Zep thirty years ago and the excessively cute “The Fix Is In” – both of which I like immensely.
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The next step for Elbow is to meld their new found commercial success and their stubborn resistance to dumbing down their music to achieve the former, into something massive. “Seldom” is a decisive step in that direction. Thanks S.
The Seldom Seen Kid
Track listing
1. “Starlings” – 5:05
2. “The Bones of You” – 4:49
3. “Mirrorball” – 5:50
4. “Grounds for Divorce” – 3:39
5. “An Audience with the Pope” – 4:27
6. “Weather to Fly” – 4:29
7. “The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver” – 5:14
8. “The Fix” – 4:27
9. “Some Riot” – 5:23
10. “One Day Like This” – 6:34
11. “Friend of Ours” – 4:38
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