Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 12/9/05
Label: V2

Richard Ashcroft may have (once, quite reasonably) credited The Verve with a Northern soul, but nowadays the only real keepers of that flame are Bury natives Elbow. Sonically, of course, they're light years apart, but the Manchester-based five piece - led by Guy Garvey, a six-foot-plus scruff with a heart as big as a bear's and the voice of a hungover angel - have staked their claim with a similar winning blend of seemingly spontaneous, humanised warmth and brooding, existential contemplation.

"Leaders Of The Free World" is supposedly their "difficult third album," but there's little sign of a struggle here. The startling, eruptive outbreaks of guitar noise and intriguingly textured effects that added to their extraordinary debut of 2001, "Asleep In The Back" (buy it now, anyone who has yet to discover it) have disappeared and it's perhaps less self-consciously measured and sombre than (the no less soul succouring) "Cast Of Thousands" from 2003, but these 11 new songs are beamed direct from soul-pop heaven.

Ostensibly, the album is themed around the breakdown of Garvey's relationship with a certain high-profile, Radio 1 DJ, but neither lyrical specificity nor embittered wallowing have ever been his way and the record's unforced expressiveness is due to the fact that the songs grew out of ideas gathered while the band was on the road. Opening track "Station Approach", for instance, reflects Elbow's shared excitement at being back in Manchester after so long away, while the album's progressive melancholia Garvey himself has attributed simply to the shift from summer through to the beginning of winter that corresponded with its creation.

Picking highlights is like trying to isolate single sparklers in a diamond-studded diadem, but the restrained, blues-tinted shuffle and reverbed falsetto of "Picky Bugger", "Mexican Standoff", with its Radiohead-toned surge-and-retreat dynamics, the surprisingly bullish chug of the title track (Elbow's first dip into the waters of political comment) and gorgeous, Blue Nile-like closer "Puncture Repair" deserve special mention. As, of course, does Garvey's devastating voice, which recalls both a less grizzled Robert Wyatt and a gruffer Mark Hollis.

Chart-topping superstardom may hold no interest whatsoever to Elbow (they've been together 14 years, after all), but it's hard not to hope for exactly that for them and heaven knows, stranger things have happened (to Pulp, for instance). Whichever way it goes, hug them hard - while you have the chance.

    by Sharon O'Connell