Elbow: The Seldom Seen Kid

"You Can't Always Get What You Want," as I expect any well-informed reader of this blog to know, is a great song by the Rolling Stones. After a (somewhat ponderous) London Bach Choir intro, it builds from a quiet acoustinc-strumming introduction into a big climactic moment where the choir returns and the guitars mix with horns and strings and everyone involved in the recording just lets it fly with orgasmic results. Not only is there a song on this album that reminds me very much of that climactic moment in music history, but the saying "You can't always get what you want" also seems to sum up my experience when first spinning this record.

I first encountered Elbow (who put out a new album between my buying and writing this,) via the song "Grounds For Divorce," which is a whip-cracking, booze-blues, hard-hearted jammed-up work song. The crunching fuzz guitar matched perfectly with vocalist Guy Garvey's mournful hazy reminiscences of the "seldom-seen kid," drowning the sorrows that weigh him down. It's pretty fiery hard rock, and in purchasing this album I expected at least a little more of it, but there was little to be found. The album is comprised mostly of drifty, dreary, dreamy, longing balladry and mid-tempo music. I did not, in fact, get "what I want" (more "Grounds for Divorce,") but maybe that lonely longing sound was just what I needed.

The album to paint its fuzzy, shifting picture with its opening track, a breathy, distant ballad called "Starlings," in which poetic lyrics are wrapped up in a watery backdrop with halting blasts of horns. Although he'll probably go unrecognized as a lyricist in his time, Garvey manages to get a number of great lines on the album and many of them appear in this song. He has a knack for coming up with complicated yet direct and evocative similes. And although Garvey's a good vocalist, coming off like a tired working-class poet in love, and the vocals are privileged heavily on this song and throughout the album, it's restrained. The album builds, and in its build the album's character emerges.

The second track, the exotic "The Bones of You" has a fair bit more pick-up, whirling like some distant underground club: like Elbow is the band that plays when the Mos Eisley Cantina band has the night off. He puts his voice to use on a number of different ballads: the sparkling crystal of "Mirrorball," the breezy, nostalgic "Weather to Fly," the bellowing, yawning "The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver," the mournful "Some Riot," and the album-closing whimper, "Friend of Ours." All these songs are good in their own way, and similar but far from the same. In them middle of it is that gem, "Grounds for Divorce," and "An Audience With The Pope," which is like a Bond theme in training, applying some serious lyrical hoodoo to an otherwise merely decent tune. There is also the crooning duet "The Fix," which is a bit corny compared to the emotionally expressive reaches of the other songs.

So "Grounds For Divorce" becomes an oddity as the rest of the album is devoid of anything that could be thought of in terms of "guitar rock." And that's not a bad thing. Even though it makes the song hard to get in-context, it adds variety to an already varied album, with strings and horns and pianos and all other sorts of little sounds I can't quite identify. The main other instrument that keeps coming back to me is the drums, which add real character to each individual track, sometimes thundering, sometimes tapping lightly, and yes, sometimes nonexistent.

The major climax of the album is "One Day Like This," a song where I'd draw the comparison to "You Can't Always Get What You Want." It begins earnestly, with some strings and pianos, and ends with a massive, life-affirming invocation of "Throw those curtains wide / One day like this a year'd see me right!" and just like that everything can seem right with the world. The lyrics to the song are relatively more direct and simple than the others, which is fitting, because happiness is so much simpler a feeling than loneliness. The chant goes on and on as the strings pipe up and a guitar bubbles on in the background, and again the power of Garvey's voice is evident: when he tells you "It's looking like a beautiful day" you fuckin' believe him.

Like Arcade Fire, though, Elbow skips the opportunity to end their album on a note of release and energy, closing with the somber, jangling blues of "Friend of Ours," a mournful farewell to a friend that whimpers out, "Love you, mate," as the album fades into nothingness. The album will lug you around emotionally... it gains that power by the end.

I wanted simple, and what I got was really quite the opposite. Here is a band interested most in poetic explorations of loneliness and longing, in quiet and loud, with a sonic palette far beyond what I'd expect, yet with songs that are well written and distinct.

It would make very good listening for a quiet, lonely Sunday afternoon, if it didn't leave you so chilled, quite frankly. Whether this is just due to the placement of "Friend of Ours" after "One Day Like This," I can't really say, but you should probably have something else to focus on while you have it on. And yet it seems too sophisticated, too meaningful to be mere background music. It can be appreciated, I think, both as a good piece of work and a sympathetic ear.

"What came first," Rob Gordon asked in High Fidelity, "The music or the misery?" I don't know whether Seldom-Seen Kid is enough to bum you out, but it will hit you hard according to how bummed you already are. In any case, it's an album with real feeling, and it works well to impart those feelings and share them with the listener. Such is the power of music. And sometimes, that's what's needed.

Buy this album from iTunes now!