Elbow- Build A Rocket Boys!

Purchased at Schoolkids Records in Raleigh, NC, on 7/8/11

After the stadium-friendly rock of their fourth album “The Seldom Seen Kid”, Manchester alternative-rock band Elbow return with “Build A Rocket Boys!”, a collection of nostalgic songs lyrically centered around lead singer Guy Garvey’s adolescence and early twenties. The album views youth as a fleeting, precious thing with an importance that’s only recognized in hindsight, like a parent seeing their child off to college and finally understanding with great sadness that they’ll never get to see their child grow up again, despite all the hardships involved.

The album starts with the 8-minute long soaring rocker “The Birds”. Richard Jupp’s steady drumbeat and Pete Turner’s fuzzed bass quickly give way to a beautiful string part, arranged by Garvey himself. Above all of this, Garvey sings (in two separate octaves!) and muses whether birds who flew over the fields in which he used to lay with his love “keep those final kisses in their tiny racing hearts”. The song is reprised at the end of the record, but all the rock-n-roll bravado is stripped away, leaving a sparse, mournful tune, but this time sung by John Moseley, a 68-year old piano tuner from Manchester, giving the song a whole new level of sadness, seen through the eyes of one who has lived his whole life hoping that at least birds will remember he existed.

“The Birds” is followed by the most beautiful song of the album, “Lippy Kids”, in which Garvey observes teenagers loitering and smoking on corners (“the cigarette senate was everything then”), which prompts him to remember “stealing booze and hour-long hungry kisses” at that age while getting more and more distant to his family as he grew older, explaining that “no one knew me at home anymore”. Now older, Garvey looks at these kids that remind him of himself and wishes they understood how precious the time they have as youngsters is by singing “Do they know those days are golden? Build a rocket boys”. This soaring vocal line, combined with Mark Potter’s powerful guitar arpeggios and a glorious Garvey-arranged choral part is the emotional apex of the record.

There are two other standout ballads on the record. “The Night Will Always Win” has Garvey singing “I miss your stupid face” a line so inherently filled with hatred, but delivered in such a romantic and heartbroken way. And the quiet “Jesus is a Rochdale Girl” is the most autobiographical song on the record, based on a girl who took Garvey in for a while when he was a 20-year-old starving musician with nothing to his name. The song has a unexpectedly brilliant broken piano part performed by Craig Potter that sounds out of place at the outset, but becomes a surprisingly integral part of the song.

“Build A Rocket Boys!” still has the bluesy rock-and roll swagger that helped make “The Seldom-Seen Kid” such a success. The lead single, “Neat Little Rows”, about a man requesting to be buried under the cobblestones of his local church, has the distorted bass, driving guitars and piano that made “Grounds For Divorce” a hit, along with the instrumental hook of the chorus, which follows a masterful time change from ¾ into four. “High Ideals” is reminiscent of XTC’s “Green Man”, with elaborate string and vocal arrangements (Garvey, again!) following and complementing the band’s parts without sounding like embellishments- in other words, the strings are equally as loud and as omnipotent as the guitar riff in this song, giving it an epic quasi-orchestral quality to it. “High Ideals” also has some of the best of Garvey’s lyrics, which discuss family traditions and heirlooms (“there’s a bayonet in my family things- it was made in the USA to defend the king, and though the sinew that thrust and all the bones it splintered are dust it’s passed from hand to hand with the wedding rings”). And “Open Arms” sounds like a hidden track by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, featuring a rousing and catchy chorus sung by a crowd coupled with massive orchestral instrumentation.

Elbow’s Guy Garvey, Richard Jupp, Craig and Mark Potter, and Pete Turner have been playing together for 20 years, and it shows on this album. “Build A Rocket, Boys!” is a stellar record, showing the band at its most intimate and at its most ambitious in songwriting and album production. Elbow has only recently gotten the mainstream recognition it deserves, and if this record is any indication, their next effort, whenever that may be, promises to be truly spectacular.

18/20