Words: Kieran Lewis
“And I don’t know Jesus anymore” snarls Elbow’s Guy Garvey, launching into the band’s 8th studio album, Giants of All Sizes. The decidedly frank opening line follows a blistering, weighty bass riff, the like of which we haven’t really heard since 2005’s Leaders of the Free World. “Dexter & Sinister”, the lead single, sets the tone for an album that is at once angry, confused and meditative.
It doesn’t take more than a cursory scroll through Elbow’s recent discography to appreciate the contrast between the sound being explored here and the work that has made them a beloved staple of film trailers and sports montages over the last decade or so. Their 2001 debut Asleep in the Back is angsty and experimental, mixing elements of prog rock with tear-jerking pianos, but it was not until seven years after its release that the Bury band would find commercial success. 2008’s Mercury Prize-winning The Seldom Seen Kid is soaring and orchestral, and saw Garvey’s knack for sincerely sentimental lyrics ignite soggy festival fields up and down the country.
While Elbow’s post 2008 work has always maintained the emotional depth and breadth that they express so well, every album since The Seldom Seen Kid has offered at least one hope-filled, misty-eyed festival anthem. On the excellent and utterly ubiquitous “One Day Like This”, Garvey tells the nation, “Throw those curtains wide/One day like this a year would see me right”. Giants of All Sizes makes no such promises.
Singer and lyricist Garvey voted remain in the 2016 referendum and makes no secret of it, but he is also not under the illusion that the half of the country that didn’t is inherently nasty. He was, however, convinced that said referendum would go very differently. The resultant shock left him, like so many of us on both sides, feeling disillusioned, out of touch and out of answers. If only more of us were able to distil that familiar cocktail of feelings into music the way Elbow can. “The whole archipelago is rocking like a suicide pedalo at high tide”, we are warned over the Peter Gabriel-inspired guitars of “Dexter & Sinister”.
This is, of course, not a purely politically-driven album, though. Yes, there’s palpable disillusionment with the state of the country and the wider world, but Garvey’s lyrics have always been at their best when dealing with the everyday. Second single “Empires”, for all its political subtext, deals plainly with the ups and downs of personal fortune: “Baby, empires crumble all the time/Pay it no mind/You just happened to witness mine”. As Garvey recently told the Classic Album Sundays podcast, the core idea of the song was born from meditating on the devastation of natural disasters with the band’s manager. “For some poor fucker,” he assures us, “the world ends every day”. In a similar vein, the sombre “The Delayed 3:15” tells of the singer’s experience onboard a train held up by a suicide on the tracks. The sensitive subject matter – even by Elbow’s standards – serves as a starting point for Garvey’s signature observational lyricism, painting a detailed picture of tutting first-class passengers and “pale-faced kids in rubber gloves/Dressed as cops outside”.
Sonically, Giants of All Sizes is a delicate balance between elements that the band has always used to great effect and newer, experimental sounds. The departure of Richard Jupp, founding member and drummer, in 2015 has, perhaps, had an impact here. Jupp has no permanent replacement, but the use of drum loops and electronic instruments on tracks like “On Deronda Road” is the sound of a band using a great loss to its advantage and taking its sound in new directions. Nowhere on the album is this showcased quite as openly as on that penultimate track, but second and third listens reveal a synthetic quality behind the striking melody of “Seven Veils”. In its angrier moments, Giants of All Sizes does not shy away from jarring distortion and stop-start instrumentals either. The organ on “White Noise White Heat” and the abrupt clarinet on “The Delayed 3:15” add eeriness and a real sense of malaise that defines the album thematically.
The most common portrayal of Elbow in the press is one of a band that, having endeared themselves to the nation with a winning formula of strings and euphoria, isn’t interested in doing much else. Music by and for sentimental, middle-aged men. If you ask me – a man who has some way to go before reaching middle age – this has never been true, but no album makes that case more strongly than Giants of All Sizes. Counterbalancing heaviness and dismay with quiet reflection, this album doesn’t pretend to offer answers to problems, collective or personal. It does, however, offer a lyrically haunting and sonically innovative snapshot of a band that still has a lot to say.
Playlist: Getting to know Elbow: An Introduction to “sentimental middle-aged man music”
Dexter and Sinister
Scattered Black and Whites
Grounds For Divorce
Great Expectations
Starlings
Newborn
Buttons and Zips
Jesus Is a Rochdale Girl
All Disco
My Trouble
White Noise White Heat
Seven Veils
One Day Like This
Image: www.elbow.co.uk
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