In March 2011, Alexandria sent me an email with the subject “I think there’s a new Elbow album.” The body just said, “We should check it out.” That was for Build a Rocket, an album I now own on vinyl and that I’ve listened to somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand times.
The album peaked at number two in the UK, number two in Ireland, number three in Belgium, five in the Netherlands and 151 in the US. So close. It did reach number one on the US Heatseekers chart, which is a listing designed to track “the sales by new and developing musical recording artists.” In 2011, Elbow had been a band for over two decades and a top ten band for eight years. That’s just a note for your reference. Do with it what you will.
We first found out about Elbow in 2008 or so. I was working in Barnes & Noble. One of the dudes in the music department played Cast of Thousands, the band’s 2003 album, over the loudspeakers. I loved it.
“It’s like sad Coldplay,” he told me.
I think he also introduced me to Earlimart. Thanks, man.
An aside. Barnes & Noble is it. It’s the place where Americans go to interact with books. It’s the local bookstore in a real and terrifying way. I don’t advocate being a blinded devotee of brands, but supporting BN is probably not a bad thing to do? How odd.
Sad Coldplay is a shitty description of Elbow. It’s not 100% wrong, but it’s wrong in important ways. It’s like describing Kendrick Lamar as “Skinny Biggie.” I guess there are parts of that description that point toward the truth, but it’s missing some relatively important pieces.
Elbow was started by Guy Garvey, Craig Potter, Mark Potter, Richard Jupp and Pete Turner. They (well, most of them) joined up in 1990 at a college in Manchester and released their first album in 2001.
I got to see them in 2017 in Philly. It was maybe the best concert of my life. I’m not sure. I hate ranking things in meaningful ways. Maybe I’ve already talked about this, but let’s take a look. Potential top concerts include:
- Elbow, 2017
- Ash, 2008
- Vampire Weekend, 2019
- Brand New, 2017
- Decemebrists, 2009
I can see that I’ve given preferential treatment to things that I was looking forward to. There are things like the Suicide Machines or the weird Ok Go concert in NY or Jimmy Eat World at the Warped Tour that I’m discounting. Those were also great.
The point is, Elbow is definitely in the running. The texture of the concert was like church. Lights flooding little corners of the room and a priest stood up in front of everyone, directing the service and offering communion. Guy works a crowd.
He hosts a show on BBC Radio 6 or maybe they just call it BBC 6 – I can’t remember. He has a soothing, pastoral voice, which adds to the feeling of being in church. For a more on the nose version of BBC radio church, you can check Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service.
Elbow continues to write lyrics that connect with me. I mentioned last week that I don’t do inspiration well. I’m not good at seeing a thing and thinking, “I wish I could do that.” Elbow might be one of the exceptions there.
I’ve never been good at appreciating poetry in the way that an English major should and so I’ve never been good at finding those resonate lines that make another person’s mind shake like crystal, but here’s a few from Elbow that I love.
From McGreggor
“the kids were in the kitchen
carving up the will
when the long line of limousines
snaked down the hill
the vicar waiting
and shaking hands
with the prodigal and pompous
who knew the man
father figures and motherfuckers
who knew the man
god’s doorman at the party
as if god knew the man“
From Little Fictions
“A muffled battle cry across the kitchen table
A baffling contretemps that shakes the day unstable
Confessions from the cab, a habit that I got from dad
The flurry of departure in a cyclone of cologne
Would often devastate the gate and hedge
And set our tiny teeth on edge
I see it in me now and pledge
To knock it on the head, that’s what I’ll do”
Finally, from The Bones of You
“So I’m there charging around with a juggernaut brow
Overdraft, speeches and deadlines to make
Cramming commitments like cats in a sack
Telephone burn and a purposeful gait
When out of a doorway
The tentacles stretch of a song that I know
And the world moves in slow-mo
Straight to my head like the first cigarette of the day”
I love all of them. That last one is from The Seldom Seen Kid, which the band released as an album played live with the BBC orchestra and which is theoretically on its way to me from UK Amazon. We’ll see if it ever shows up.
One of my failures in college (of which there are many) was a headstrong and stroppy refusal to understand or engage with sociology. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t think I was going to learn a whole lot in the class, but it wasn’t any worse than a lot of other classes. I thought it was bullshit and maybe it was, but I certainly didn’t give it my all.
In that class, we had a report on – well, I’m not actually sure. It might have been music? Most of the kids in there were in the music school and music fits into the sociology mold. Let’s say it was on music.
I half assed this presentation on why Bad Religion was a good punk band and some other band (can’t remember who) wasn’t good. I think the whole thing relied on playing clips from songs and then looking at the audience like, “Huh. Right? You see what I’m talking about.”
Not great. The thing I’m trying to convey is that I’m not good at saying why I like things or even why they’re important. I wish I was better at it.
Elbow, for their part, is an extension of lots of little moving parts in British music. The Beatles are the piece that you can’t escape. They pointed to this world where violins and pianos and heartfelt lyrics could all exist and sell records. So let’s start there.
The Beatles also incorporated blues in ways I don’t think had been very popular in the UK to that point. This then extended with bands like the Stones, who took blues from a background element and pulled it to the front.
In the 70s, bands started bringing in more orchestral notes. Progressive rock grew in popularity. Elbow has pointed to Genesis as being one of their big influences. While prog rock withered as punk took hold, a few bands held onto the dream.
By the early 80s, just a few of the big 70s progressive rock bands were still really kicking. Instead, the UK was taken over by the New Romantics, new wave and synth pop. These bands kept a weird skewed eye to the world of prog rock but brought a different tone and take. The blues and soul music continued to thrive at the edges, though everything had taken punk’s influence into account, at this point.
The mid-80s brought back Beatles-based rock. Alternative bands like the Smiths rebelled against the all manufactured sounds and styles of new wave bands and returned to simple rhythms and instruments (more or less). They kept a lot of the musicality that had been shoved into the system, though, and also turned to lyrics and songs in the blues fashion – namely, those songs that talked about life as it was lived by normal people.
Now we’re moving into the early 90s, when Elbow was starting to make music. Radiohead puts out Pablo Honey in 1993 and says, “Well what if we can have everything all the time?” Britpop starts to take off. Oasis and Blur fight for dominance. Elbow takes this world and carves out a little niche of poetic, orchestral music.
The Britpop battle was fascinating, by the way. You listened to Song 2 and maybe another Blur song? Oasis was just everywhere all the time, in the US. In the UK, that wasn’t the case. In a week, Blur sold about 275 thousand copies of their single Country House, while Oasis sold 216 thousand of Roll with It. Oasis definitely wins the total album sales war, but Blur did alright for themselves. You should listen to Blur.
After all the dust settles, Elbow ends up with this smart chunk of British music. They’ve kept themselves up in the face of everything from Adele to Amy Winehouse to the Arctic Monkeys to One Direction, which is a group that doesn’t start with the letter A. Weak.
As I believe I’ve said before, I don’t see vinyl collecting as the pursuit of completeness or a total history of me. Elbow is the only band I want to own everything I can from. All the LPs, all the EPs and as many of the little collectibles and one-offs as I can along the way.
At the end of it all, they make me very happy. I think pursuing that happiness is worthwhile. We’ll see how far along I get.