Elbow looked for a while to be settling into a mellow, beatific serenity. Their last album, 2021’s Flying Dream 1, was a winningly gentle affair, its delicate tracks seemingly competing between themselves to be the most soothingly romantic. You idly wondered if the band were easing into a benign dotage.
This impression was spectacularly misleading. Elbow have always been too itchy and antsy a group to settle for mere prettiness, and their recent album, Audio Vertigo, their fourth to top the UK chart, returned to more challenging musical terrain. No prog rock band worth their salt ever totally abandons their uneven time signatures.
Singer Guy Garvey has spoken with relish of the new record’s “gnarly” beats and these are evident in the eccentric Lovers’ Leap, introduced with staccato volleys of brass. “It’s nice to be back in Peter Mandelson’s wigwam,” grins the ever-droll Garvey, a reminder that Elbow stretch right back to the days when the O2 was the Millennium Dome.
Garvey increasingly resembles a rather rumpled Stephen Fry, yet his understated demeanour paradoxically emphasises the insatiable yearning of this charged, subtle music that fills arenas. He remains a rueful, regret-laden poet: new track The Picture is a rollicking lament for a lost love who was a “slender and elegant foot on the neck”.
The rich beauty of Elbow’s music is forever adjacent to bathos. Ebullient, synth-driven recent single Balu has a gorgeous, piquant chorus yet finds Garvey wryly apologising for being “something of a sacred cow”. Another new track, Good Blood Mexico City, veers from Fela Kuti-style sunshine guitar to hefty heavy metal thud. Through it all, Garvey beams like a big-bearded, big-hearted, benevolent uncle.
It’s been an evening of stately heartbreak and profound whimsy. Elbow encore with the paean to the precocity of adolescence that is Lippy Kids, then close with their signature tune, the life-affirming One Day Like This, a song that could be a millstone around their necks were it not so exquisitely sumptuous. Mandy’s wigwam is utterly charmed.
