Because Elbow makes pretty rock music, Guy Garvey occasionally tries a falsetto, and the whole thing has a distinctly English sensibility, the comparisons to Coldplay come easily. The bands' differences are real, however, and crucial.
Elbow seems more reliable, more grounded. Garvey's knack for lyrical detail and his droll humor focus on the dramas at hand; he doesn't have one eye on the girl and the other on free-trade coffee, but rather on the facts of life as most people experience them.
Lines such as "Your sweet reassurances don't change the fact that he's better looking than me" get to the heart of human frailties without resorting to pretension. And when Garvey wants to get dreamy, he does so without the tired cliches that pass for insight with Chris Martin (on "The Everthere," he muses "All my saints have taken bribes, singing going, going, gone/All the angels taken dives, leaving you the only one").Nearly everything about Elbow is delivered with an inviting subtlety and restraint.
The flourishes of slightly off-center instrumentation and sounds, such as the hand-claps on "Mexican Standoff" or the background vocals on "An Imagined Affair," rarely call attention to themselves but consistently catch the ear. They provide texture without clutter. Even when the songs build to a climax, as in "Station Approach," Garvey's subdued singing plays against the music's vitality, creating a nice tension.
"Leaders of the Free World" is a giving record, easy to listen to but deeper than it appears and more rewarding over time.
Jeffrey Lee Puckett is SCENE's pop music editor and oversees this page.
Source: courier-journal.com
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