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