| Print |

Written by Jim Dunn Wednesday, 25 January 2006 11:54

“I never know what I want but I know when I’m low/that I need to be in the town where they know/what I’m like and don’t mind.”

Buy this CD 

With Leaders of the Free World, Elbow come home to Manchester. In a PLAYBACK:stl interview (coming next month), Garvey talks about the lyrics and assembling the album over a long period of time at home—12 months in a huge room, as he describes it. The relief of being on home turf and the ability to heal and take control of lives thrown off by constant touring is evident in the beautiful opener “Station Approach.” Garvey sings with every ounce of emotion, “I never know what I want but I know when I’m low/that I need to be in the town where they know/what I’m like and don’t mind.”

The album continues on through a litany of laments that spares no one, especially Garvey. With its references to fish out of water, “Picky Bugger” disassembles the illusion that drinking brings relief. Several songs examine and seek to heal Garvey’s broken heart (from a very public romance gone bad) and his ability to move on with a new love. “My Very Best” gets right to the point, with Garvey singing, “Keep your sympathy/don’t need the healing to start/you’ve gone, gone/and made a beautiful hole in my heart.” This is what Guy Garvey does best: From the beginning, he has always had a very succinct way of summing up feelings. The lines can be pithy, sharp, or undeniably, overbearingly sweet, but he hits his targets with stunning accuracy.

It would be a mistake not to mention the band. Elbow has been a very tight unit for 15 years; Garvey describe his bandmates as the glue that holds him together, saving him from “sliding off” several times. They are also fine musicians, assisting in bringing out the richness and depth of the lyrics. On “The Everthere,” as Garvey laments being let down by past relationships, wondering whether this one will be the “everthere,” it is clear that, in many ways, he is talking about his true family: his band.

Garvey saves his greatest bile for current resident of the White House. “The fact that we made it the title track to the album shows where we stand,” he explained. On an album that is almost wholly personal, the one political song is a resounding salvo, with lyrics like, “The leaders of the free world are just little boys throwing stones/they’re easy to ignore till they’re knocking on the door of your home,” and, “Passing the gun from father to feckless son/climbing a landslide where only the good die young.” Garvey is an admitted information geek and his indignation with things as they are comes out eloquently in this song.

Leaders of the Free World works its way through feelings of loss and redemption (though, for the record, Garvey reveals he is in a very good place in his life). Though it never entirely reaches the elation of its opening track, in the end, with the simply performed “Puncture Repair,” it manages to sum up that, with friends to surround you and care for you, there is safety: “I leaned on you today/I regularly hurt but never say/you patched me up and sent me away/I leaned on you today.” Tonic of the best sort.