Elbow - The Take Off And Landing Of Everything

Elbow do cloud-scraping bombast as well as any of their peers – with the bonus that frontman Guy Garvey is the sort of every-bloke you can imagine sipping bitter with. Along with the uplift, however, the Mancunians have a tendency to brood which has arguably served as a drag on their progress. They remain best known for ‘One Day Like This’, from 2008’s Mercury winning The Seldom Seen Kid – and yet that song’s effusiveness papers over the fact that the other big hit from the album ‘Grounds For Divorce’, was dark and recriminatory – a stormy tune about stormy emotions.

On their self-proclaimed ‘mid-life crisis record’ (Garvey recently turned 40), such vitriol is generally absent but, make no mistake, this is a bleak record, a paean to middle years ennui, the slow realisation that, actually, there are no more second chances. You’ve made your bed and here you will stay. How much of the moodiness is down to the fact that Garvey recently separated from his long-term partner, writer Emma Jane Unsworth,
is hard to be definitive about of course (several of the tracks are by happily married band-mates). Still, it’s tempting to see the break-up as responsible for the heavier mood and the edgy air Garvey brings to the several ballads that concern escape and renewal. The single ‘New York Morning’, for example, is a putative valentine to Manhattan but, really, it’s about trying to flee the person you have become and briefly convincing yourself that you have succeeded.

Musically, there are no obvious big singles here – the tone is creeping and understated, with guitars nagging gently in the background, Garvey sounding like someone in the throes of a terminal hangover (he whispers, he croons, he laments). Don’t let the title mislead: the Take Off And Landing Of Everything isn’t about flight and release – powerfully delivered, it’s about crashing earthwards, straining to recall a time when you were able to soar without a care in the world.