Elbow - Leaders Of The Free World

 
Between their formation in 1990 and this third album, Manchester-based five-piece Elbow produced a steady flow of stellar (and a few not-so-stellar) music experiments, for which they garnered little recognition.

They didn’t seem to care overly much. Having already been together a decade, six-foot frontman Guy Garvey and crew seemed used to missing the fickle sweep of the media spotlight and were resigned to focusing on what they did best: writing unique, personal and wonderful songs.

Yet something must have grated, for Leaders Of The Free World is an overt and ambitious attempt to take on their limelight-hogging peers (Coldplay, The Doves) with a series of songs that by turns light up the sky, elucidate the soul and stimulate the senses.

Eschewing the bloated conceptual and production overkill that tends to mar many such ambitious projects, the band have simply played more to their muse, adding extra sonic detail, removing some of the bombast, breathing more confidence into their billowing arrangements.
 
Beginning with the poignant, slow-building “Station Approach,” Leaders Of The Free World undulates through a host of shifting textures and moods. The jerky, bluesy “Picky Bugger” leads into the rousing “Forget Myself”; the funky title track – a political first for the band – descends into the ethereal ambience of “An Imagined Affair”; the Mariachi waltz of “Mexican Standoff” contrasts with the mellow, introspective “The Everthere”.

This coruscating soundtrack is brought to life by Garvey’s poetic talents. In his beautifully gruff tones, he delivers lyrics that bundle personal intimacy with universal appeal via a kind of withered wisdom. The songs are peppered with unforgettable imagery: a doorman has “a head like Mars”; the better-looking boyfriend of his ex would look better “beneath the wheels of a car”; a call girl has “yesterday’s eyes”.

As for how the album fares against the ‘competition’, it’s fair to say that ballads such as “Great Expectations,” “An Imagined Affair” and even the short ambient piece “Puncture Repair” match anything the band’s peers have created in terms of musical and lyrical poignancy, and without resorting to cliché or formula.

In fact, Leaders Of The Free World delivers an emotional range that’s rare if not unique in today’s musical world. Human, sympathetic and affecting. Elbow might still be far from fame but unlike most of their contemporaries they’re even further away from formula.