My ex girlfriend keeps on writing about the new Elbow album, saying that the first track, Starlings, is the closest thing she’s ever heard that sounds like the musical representation of falling in love. I’m biased in listening to it because I know it’s me she’s thinking of when she says that, but I think she’s probably right.
I have always liked Elbow a lot, though I’ve never quite been sure if I get them. There’s always been something I’ve not been able to grab onto. Listening to them now – and going back to their third album, Leaders of the Free World – I think I am just about getting them. And getting what I never got, which is that they’re pretty beautiful, really, and not very self indulgent. I briefly wondered if it’s that I am not very good at listening to sad music, before remembering that Grace by Jeff Buckley is one of my favourite albums ever, and I’ve listened to it over and over and over again in the past seven years. But Buckley is self indulgent, both vocally and instrumentally, both for him playing and for the listener. Elbow are far more…self contained. Straight forward. There’s no thrashing about, or moments of complete total extreme vulnerability that suddenly hit you. It’s just all really really really good wonderful songs that break your heart a little bit to listen, because they’re pretty vulnerable the whole way through. I think that was hard for me to grab onto when I was a teenager; I just didn’t know what to do with it. As if it all had to go somewhere, or identify with something, or soundtrack something and be awfully poignant. And now I feel like I can appreciate it and love it even if there is none of that aural urgency and excitement that I love so much about a lot of other pieces of sad music. Maybe that’s my ears growing up a little bit.
And if Starlings on The Seldom Seen Kid is the sound of falling in love – I can’t find it online, and I don’t want to be the one to leak it, so no links there – then I think, probably, My Very Best is the sound of falling out of it. At least this time round.
Keep your sympathy, don’t need the healing to start. You’ve gone, gone and made a beautiful hole in my heart.
