Elbow once was an awesome band with electronic sound effects. In fact, keyboardist Craig Potter can crank out some of the coolest sounds with his keyboard. However, their fourth album, “The Seldom Seen Kid,” is an inconsistent album with boring songs to spare.
It’s a shame, because the album starts off strong. The first song on the album, “Starlings,” is a wonderful shock to my system, with a blasting trumpet section that breaks through the silent harp sounds in the background. It’s also touching to hear the old singer, Guy Garvey, singing to his daughter to “find a man that needs you more than I.” His voice brings to mind the awesome tenor voice of Doves’ singer Jimi Goodwin. This opening song is creative and beautiful.
And the album has many surprises. The song “The Bones of You” is the gem of the entire album, with a cool acoustic guitar flourishing next to a cool drum beat. The true revelation of the song comes when the bass line comes in, making the song much more ominous and dramatic. Goodwin’s lyrics are awesome as well – he sings an entire story on how he longs to be with his love, but his long work hours get in the way between him and her. There’s nothing more fun than to hear Goodwin sing creative lyrics such as “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.”
From the beginning two songs, the album almost never seems to lose momentum. Their second single on the album, “Grounds for Divorce,” is one of the best songs I’ve heard from an English indie-rock band. The awesome loud plodding beat sounds as funky as Blur’s dance rock song “Girls and Boys.” The guitar chord jangle is as fresh as a folk rock jam by The Band. And the guitars break into an awesome loud jam before softening to make room for Craig Potter’s quiet keyboards. Then the serenity is broken back into the electric guitars and the plodding beat. This album is the best thing that I’ve heard from an English band since the Doves’ disco song “There Goes the Fear.”
Unfortunately, the momentum doesn’t last for the rest of the album. The next few tracks, “Weather to Fly” features boring acoustic guitar chord progressions and the singer singing some dull lyrics about the perfect weather to take an airplane trip. “The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver” is equally boring, as well as “Some Riot.” In fact, the mood is only broken up by the first single of the album, “One Day Like This.” But even this song didn’t really sound memorable, either. Pushed to the back of the album, Mark Potter and Craig Potter perform a great guitar and synthesizer orchestration, while Garvey sings about a beautiful day. Despite the Beatles-style choral singing at the end of the song, it sounds just as anticlimactic as Oasis’s cheesy 11-minute ballad, “All Around the World.”
Elbow hasn’t aged very well. This new album proves that Elbow is experiencing the same fourth album slump that Pearl Jam experienced in their career. They once had an awesome soft industrial rock sound, similar to Primitive Radio Gods, but this album shows that they’re not quite as good as they used to be. Don’t fret – there are other English indie-rock bands that sound better than Elbow. Although it is a decent album, I wouldn’t be surprised if listeners pass this off as a dud.
