Build A Rocket Boys!- Elbow

Brace for landing: Guy Garvey and co have made their masterpiece

As tradition dictates, every generation needs an album to soundtrack it. You can go right back to the free love of 1967 and Sgt Pepper. 70s industrial strikes? Sex Pistols and Never Mind The Bollocks. 80s Thatcherite gloom? Where’s my copy of The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead?

Step forward Elbow, proverbial “band-of-the-people” after the huge success of 2008’s Seldom Seen Kid. It was a fine album with telly’s ubiquitous anthem of choice One Day Like This among its riches. The stage is set for its grand follow-up: either an album aiming for stadiums, or their career-destroying Kid A moment.

Build A Rocket Boys! (their exclamation mark, not mine) is neither of these beasts, and thank goodness for that. What we have here is a distillation of everything that has been so great about Elbow over four albums: Guy Garvey’s down-to-earth and perfect songwriting; a sweeping, uplifting tone set against a monochrome background; and a dedication to not always doing it the easy way. It’s genuinely, without hyperbole, a masterpiece.

Opener The Birds is the ultimate scene-setter: not opting to push for epic grandstanding, it instead starts quiet, moody and shuffling, with Guy Garvey muttering about birds being “the keepers of our secrets”. This almost paranoid beginning flowers like the springtime he sings of, built around a looping acoustic guitar line. Eight minutes long but feeling like half that, it then explodes into warm bleeps and bloops and surging strings, before Garvey’s emotional, rich voice takes full flight.

It serves to highlight how far they’ve come as songwriters, a skill of theirs that hardly needed refining. Lippy Kids is by far Garvey’s greatest lyric, singing of the title characters “on the corner again”. In interviews, Garvey has said that he was put in reflective mood after moving home in the midst of writing this album, and it shows, looking back on his own experiences: “I never perfected that simian stroll.” When he sings “Do they know those days are golden?” it’s not with cynicism, but a show of support for this country’s youth against their detractors.

Elsewhere, Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl finds Garvey whispering in your ear, finding solace in “nothing to proud of, nothing to regret” as the album’s greatest addition to the mix bring in a new layer: keyboards. Craig Potter has always been there, but here he’s thrust forward, bringing prominent warmth to every track, and spine tingling piano to Neat Little Rows. The River and Open Arms are anthems for lost souls, the latter with choir keeping a door open should a friend return: “open arms for broken hearts like yours my boy, come home again.” Dear Friends is a powerful and tear-jerking finale, quietly finding solace in those around us, the band provide a big musical hug.

For the sake of reader sanity, that is where I will stop. But one could very easily dissect what’s wonderful about every single track. For those who still love their albums as single, whole works, BARB! is a wet dream. It’s exactly the album this country needs, searching through the bleak darkness for glimmers of optimism. Thank whoever you pray to for Elbow, the world can rest easier with them here.

5/5

Best Tracks:
Lippy Kids
The Birds
Dear Friends
Open Arms
Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl

Yuck- Yuck

Promising debut from shoegaze/grunge revivalists

Cajun Dance Party was one of THOSE bands. You know the type. Every now and then music publications tell you which indie bands will dominate the next few years’ landscape. Like Joe Lean And The Jing Jang Jong (remember them?) from the same sort of time, CDP never quite built on the fuss and threw it away.

From their ashes rise Daniel Blomberg and Max Bloom. They're throwing more straight-forward shapes in new band Yuck- great name with a nice little line in fuzzy, scuzzy indie, with the noise-love of Sonic Youth crossed with the melodies of Mazzy Star, and other grunge also-rans from the 90s.

It’s hardly a new proposition, and it has already been done far better, frankly. However, there’s enough verve and a few pop hooks on show here to create an enjoyable, if forgettable, first album stab.

Underneath the layers of distortion lies some great guitar work. Bloom and Blomberg make the instruments squeal and squall on The Wall, and the subtle acoustic lines that support Shook Down (as well as the rather lovely vocals) wouldn’t sound out of place on this year’s hip indie film soundtrack. Rhythm support from bassist Mariko Doi and drummer Jonny Rogoff do the job further down in the mix, but they hardly stand out.

Quieter tracks like Suicide Policeman and Sunday are a nice distraction, showing range and a degree of songwriting nous (“I just want to let you know/I could be your suicide policeman” is like a big man hug). In other moments, tracks like Georgia and Stutter show off another early-90s love of Yuck’s: shoegaze. It’s nice but, once again, Yuck are a little late to the party and it just puts better examples like Girls in mind. Yuck really work when they bring the rock.

This is found in abundance on The Wall and Holing Out- wonderful and slightly complex grunge at its best. Top of the pile though has to be closing track Rubber. With distorted vocals and an element of melody lurking beneath a wall of noise, its seven minutes build and build to a cacophony of sound cascading to the song’s climax. It’s their most Sonic Youth moment and it really shines.

Yuck isn’t an album that’s going to change the world, and it’s a revival movement that has been explored many times before. Despite this, the London quartet’s debut is fun and perfectly serviceable. Just don’t go in expecting fireworks.

3/5

Best Tracks:
Rubber
The Wall
Suicide Policeman

Radiohead- The King Of Limbs

Is it another masterpiece for the Oxford quintet? Almost...


Well wasn’t that fun? Yes, two weeks ago The Most Important Band In The World (TM) struck again, suddenly announcing the release of their new album, and then releasing it a day early for no good reason other than boredom it seems.

King Of Limbs follows the path of unconventional releases pioneered with Radiohead's previous album- 2008’s In Rainbows. Like that record, it has taken time for the fuss around the surprise to die down, allowing sole focus on the music. King Of Limbs also has the problem of following a genuine masterpiece: In Rainbows marked the point where Thom Yorke and co stopped trying to be machines, and invested in a little human emotion.

Unsurprisingly, this new album doesn’t quite live up to this billing. It’s not a huge step forward sonically- King Of Limbs for once is an exercise of evolution over revolution. It takes many of the ideas found on In Rainbows and develops them into new shapes. In many ways this is similar to what Amnesiac did with Kid A.

What is first noticeable is the absence of Johnny Greenwood’s guitar, an instrument having a renaissance on the last two records- his acoustic work on tracks like Faust Arp being a particular high. Here he’s only really heard front-and-centre on the scattered funk of Morning Mr Magpie, and minor acoustic flourishes on Little By Little and Give Up The Ghost. Even then, he can be tough to spot.

And this represents the only real problem with King Of Limbs: it doesn’t feel like a full-band effort. The man in control is clearly Thom Yorke, and it feels more like a solo piece by him. Feral, for instance, locates Radhiohead taking dubstep elements pioneered by Mr Yorke on his Eraser album. The album as a whole also shies away from more emotional lyrics, back into the absurd and cryptic (closer Separator finds Yorke claiming to be a fish now, for instance).

Two instruments work wonderfully though: Philip Selway’s avant-garde drumming is fresh and exciting, even on the quieter tracks. There’s also some of the band’s most beautiful piano work. Codex takes the framework of Pyramid Song from Amnesiac. It’s utterly involving yet ethereal and other-worldly at the same time. It’s this mood that dominates across the final three tracks. Separator, in particular, carries an almost positive sound not usually associated with Radiohead. Don’t let anyone label them miserablists.

There are other strengths: the spine-shivering brass that descends over Bloom is perfectly judged on a track that starts off a little muddled. It’s also unsurprising that Lotus Flower was the first “single” from King Of Limbs as it’s the only song to feature anything coming close to a chorus. It’s a chorus that soars, Thom Yorke’s sweet falsetto sitting atop a lolloping bassline.

If any other band released this album, it would be declared their masterpiece, and on first listen it carries that feeling. But as you live with the record, a slight sense of dissatisfaction creeps in: you’re left wondering how they took three years to create these 8 tracks- they’ve made better albums. This is a great Radiohead album- just not a life-changing one.

4/5

Best Tracks:
Codex
Seperator
Lotus Flower
Feral