‘You’re a pitiless millstone / Impossible check / You’re a lure to the shore / And the rocks and a wreck / You’re a slender and elegant foot on the neck / And I love you.’ Elbow frontman Guy Garvey delivers these poetically devastating lyrics on “The Picture,” one of twelve tracks from the band’s tenth studio album, Audio Vertigo. Elbow’s previous album, Flying Dream 1 (which landed on our Top 20 Albums of 2021 list), was whimsical and contemplative, and now the band has emerged post-pandemic with a boisterous spirit, delivering an album full of groovy hooks and dark romantic musings.
“Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years” kicks off the album in a soaring, introspective fashion, signaling that the ensuing musical offering will be filled with thoughts on the battle between self and society and the distracting danger of star-crossed lovers. These internal (and external) conflicts are worn right on Garvey’s sleeve. As if in a confessional, he sings, ‘I haven’t paid for cabs or beers / Or met a cunt in twenty years / Like all that outrun poverty / All I have was coming to me.’
On “Balu,” Elbow’s most lively single in years, the band bursts to life with synth-heavy hooks and a prominent horn section. ‘Oh my big Balu with my wine I pine for you / My days are shapeless now / I’m something of a sacred cow’ Garvey begins the song, lamenting a doomed romance. The album is full of lyrical love and passion, undercut by the shadow of a cynical world and semi-ironically backdropped by upbeat instrumentation. Channeling a Peter Gabriel-esque sound, Garvey announces anxious trepidation about the crumbling world around us in “Her to the Earth,” singing ‘You’ve got pain / You’ve got rage / Well, we’ll hold the front page / We live in a troubling age.’
Clocking in at about forty minutes, Audio Vertigo is one of Elbow’s shortest albums (alongside Giants of All Sizes). The run time isn’t surprising considering the various pop elements that keep the songs concise and the album thumping along, from funk inspirations to garage-rock distortions. A specific sense of time and space is also one of the album’s strongest characteristics. In “Knife Fight,” Garvey describes a drunken violent encounter outside a bar in Istanbul, singing ‘The fellas left together laughing and bleeding / Oh and the moon was full’ and finishes the story with a celebratory repetitive outcry, ‘Hallelujah, buy us a pint!’ Later, in a short song titled “Poker Face,” moreso a mid-album interlude, we bear witness to a troubled narrator’s self-discrimination and regret in a seedy hotel, ‘You blew like smoke from the room / They slid the bill under the door / Doubled by the mirror you broke / Can’t feel like this anymore.’ As is always the case, Garvey has a knack for fluid, visceral imagery.
All across Audio Vertigo, songs carry a tonal immediacy, a dire warning, even as they explore visions and memories with elegiac accuracy. The choice listeners have is whether to be swept up by the rhythms and rough-edged buoyancy or to listen deeper for the melancholic distractions within the lyrics. On the album’s finale, “From the River,” Garvey sings ‘If and when you cry / Feed it to the flowers you’ll find along the way / Funny wise and kind / Use those superpowers / Every day,’ thus ending on an ultimately warm-hearted advisory note for a future equally filled with beauty and trouble. Whether we choose to focus on the instrumentation or the lyrics or ideally embrace both simultaneously, Audio Vertigo is a rewarding record and an unexpectedly exciting evolution of a well-established band.
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Audio Vertigo will be released on Friday, March 22nd.
You can check out the videos for “Balu” and “Lovers’ Leap” below.
