Tag: Elbow

Tunes

Best tunes of 2011: #14 Elbow “With love”

Post author By jprobichaud
Post date May 7, 2019
5 Comments on Best tunes of 2011: #14 Elbow “With love”

As a long time fan of British rock, I’ve always known there was a difference between the music scenes of Scotland, Ireland, and England and those here in North America. I had long imagined and romanticized that everyone over there listened to the same music I loved and other stuff I hadn’t yet heard because I knew that my favourite bands that I saw in tiny clubs in Toronto played to much larger crowds in much larger venues all over their native countries. However, my friends Tim and Mark, after spending a few years living and working in London shortly after the BritPop explosion, returned to Canada with news that most of the people they encountered listened to the same pop music consumed in North America. Still, they conceded, the radio played a lot of stuff that wasn’t played here and as we already knew, the press was very much different and more involved in exploring indie music.

I’ve gotten to learn more of these differences and similarities since starting in on this blogging gig almost eight years ago and in conversing with fellow bloggers from out that way. What hadn’t occurred to me but probably should have is that some of the bands I listen to that get little to no air play in Canada are so overplayed and overblown in England and as hated or ridiculed as Nickelback might be in some circles here.

And so it apparently is with Elbow, whom I love and have done since I happened upon them since the early 2000s. They’ve graced these pages a few times in the past couple years and comments have been decidedly mixed but leaning more towards the negative. I’ve had to forewarn a certain blogging colleague (I’m looking at you Vinyl Daft Dad) that another Elbow post was coming. But I think I can safely say this might be their last appearance for the foreseeable future.

“With love” is track three off the English rock band’s fifth album, “Build a rocket, boys!”. The album was less melancholy than its predecessors, mining the happier memories of youth for subject matter, but this one has frontman Guy Garvey pleading his case for a friend to join him on a night out for drinks. “I give my liver to see you, abide and ride shotgun. A Bacchian scandal awaits me, just can’t do it alone. Your sweetheart probably hates me, but I’ll send you home your dome filled up – with love.” To help Garvey in this Herculean effort, he’s got his bandmates chiming in with a heavy beat and bass accompaniment, ringing guitars and twinkling piano flourishes and encouraging handclaps. The devil has even enlisted the Hallé youth choir to add a big oomph at the chorus, an exclamation mark on the love!

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2011 list, click here.

Tags 2010s, Alternative, Alternative Rock, Best tunes, British rock, Elbow, Indie, Indie rock, Manchester

Tunes

Best tunes of 2001: #1 Elbow “Any day now”

Post author By jprobichaud
Post date March 28, 2019
5 Comments on Best tunes of 2001: #1 Elbow “Any day now”

<< #2

As great as 2001 was for indie rock as a whole, especially considering the garage rock explosion and all the bands I discovered as a result, whenever I think of the year, there is one band and one album that always comes to mind. Interesting, then, that I didn’t really come upon Elbow’s debut album, “Asleep in the back”, until the spring of 2002.

As I mentioned a few times over the course of this series, I made the move to Ottawa with Victoria in the summer of 2001. However, we were pretty regular in our trips back to Toronto that first year in the city to visit family and friends. The following spring we managed to coordinate a trip to Toronto with my friends’ annual spring camping trip to Haliburton. I had arranged beforehand to hitch a ride back to Ottawa with James, a friend of ours from high school, who was actually living in the area. It was a great trip as usual but a bit cold still and my ride back to Ottawa decided to ditch the trip early. And so it was that we made the three plus hour trip back in the wee hours of the Sunday morning and I got back to my apartment just before 6am.

Victoria wasn’t due back until much later that day so I had plenty of time to sleep. While getting ready for bed, I slipped into my CD carousel this album I had just gotten by chance and pressed play. In my sleep deprived state, the opening track just enveloped me in warmth and I smiled in spite of myself. I slipped under the covers and replayed the track, set the sleep mode, pressed the repeat button and fell asleep to it. Later, when I awoke, I gave the rest of the album a listen and fell in love with it too. It has since become one of my favourites, not just of the year, but of the whole decade. You might remember that another song off “Asleep in the back”, the first single off it, “Red” appeared at #12 on this list.

Of course, that opening track that serenaded me to sleep in that early morning in the spring of 2002 was “Any day now”, my pick for the best tune of 2001. At just over six minutes in length, it feels epic and immense, a song about yearning, impatience, and the need to break free. There’s something sinister about the organs, lots of sustain and reverb, menacing and teasing. And then, the bass drops in with the drums, heavy and violent but the violence never appears, it’s always a threat, which makes it worse, almost like a Tarantino film in this way. The tension is only raised by the hints of children playing at the playground. The vocals are repetitive and mechanical and mesmerizing, looping over and over again, practice makes perfect makes reality. Guy Garvey finally shows his stride and breaks out at the end, adding a flourish of vocals that foreshadow a whole successful career that this song is hoping for, twisting fate into a pretzel.

Not convinced? Listen to it again, maybe next time it’ll take. It certainly has done me in.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2001 list, click here.

Tags 2000s, Alternative, Alternative Rock, Best tunes, British rock, Elbow

Albums

Best albums of 2008: #5 Elbow “The seldom seen kid”

Post author By jprobichaud
Post date February 21, 2019
7 Comments on Best albums of 2008: #5 Elbow “The seldom seen kid”

I’d like to say that I’ve been a fan of Elbow since the beginning but that wouldn’t be technically accurate. The band has been around since 1990 or 1991, albeit under a different name up to 1997 when they adopted their current moniker. I can say, however, that I caught on to their debut album, “Asleep in the back”, shortly after its release in 2001. (Yes, it took them that long to finally get a record out but that’s another story.) The album quickly became a favourite, spent months in my CD carousel, and I would name-drop them as often as possible when talking music with friends. It got so that it was a running joke. But I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t get enough of this band’s dense atmospheric sound, all anchored by Guy Garvey’s unique, emotive vocals. They were like nothing else out there at the time. I once tried finding a comparison point and the best I could do was put Peter Gabriel in charge of a more-orchestral oriented Coldplay or Gene but even that seemed like I was trying to force it too much. My crush on Elbow only grew over time, as with each consecutive album their sound grew lusher and more complex, and they veered further and further away from those tropes that defined the traditional rock and roll band.

Elbow’s “The seldom seen kid” is the band’s fourth studio album and first on the Fiction records imprint. The album won the 2008 Mercury prize, an honour that the debut was nominated for but did not win. It certainly was up there with the debut as one of my own favourite of Elbow’s albums up to that point, setting a high water mark that its successor, 2011’s “Build a rocket boys!” couldn’t possibly reach.

‘Beauty’ or ‘beautiful’ are terms that are often inaccurately ascribed to music and are terms that shouldn’t be used lightly. But in Elbow’s case, ‘beauty’ is the most apt term I can think of and it could easily be the name of their particular style of music. “The seldom seen kid”, like Elbow’s other albums, doesn’t just create at an atmospheric sound, but whole worlds for you to inhabit, to live and laugh and cry in, as one song bleeds into the next. Each song is painstakingly arranged, the opulent instrumentation acting like a protective carriage to its soul: Garvey’s voice.

If you’ve never listened to Elbow before, “The seldom seen kid” would be a wonderful place to start. Don’t know where to begin? I’d say at the beginning but failing that, here are my three picks for you to sample.

”The fix”: “The fix is in. The odds that I got were delicious. The fix is in. The jockey is cocky and vicious.” This track has the added bonus of being touched by the hand of another talented musician with immediately recognizable vocals: Richard Hawley. His rich baritone vocals jive perfectly with Garvey’s, either while trading coyly or while in pleasant harmony. It is a slinky piece, obviously influenced by Hawley’s mere presence and his penchant for gleefully old-school sounds, tempered with his golden work on guitars.

”Grounds for divorce”: “There’s a hole in my neighbourhood, down which of late I cannot help but fall.” With a song title like this, it’s fitting that the song plays like one a chain gang might sing. From the marching drum beat to the call and response vocals in the intro to the dirty, southern bass line throughout, Garvey us leads through a rousing romp that is guaranteed to get you stomping.

”One day like this”: “So throw those curtains wide, one day like this a year would see me right.” With six and a half minutes of string flourishes, peppy beats, and uplifting vocal twists and turns, this song makes an ambitious bid for the title of my favourite Elbow track. It’s just one of those songs for which the volume can never be turned up quite enough. While listening to it, you want its blissful ecstasy to fill every crevice of your hearing, to blot the sounds of your humdrum day. You want to join in on the singalong refrain that carries on through the last half of the song with the thought that maybe tomorrow will be that day. Yup. Beautiful.