Elbow - 'Cast Of Thousands' (V2)
4/5
By: Toby L
You try it. Spend the best part of eight years compiling material for a debut-album that isn't to surface until the first, second and then - finally - third attempt. And then try and follow it up.
No, Elbow's rise wasn't a swift one, was it? The best part of a decade wrestling with the inadequacy of the British music-industry (initial interest; changes-of-heart; label-swapovers), it was 2001's 'Asleep In The Back' that finally hit the nail in the coffin and struck the release of Guy Garvey and co.'s monumental early material.
Top-40 singles, press-hype, a Mercury nomination, sell-out tours. Sorted.
Affirmatively, all that heard the grandiose work were blown away - eleven, lurching odes with almost a spiritual resilience and capacity to repetitively enthral not seen in such intense degrees since the emergence of, say, ooh, Radiohead.
But, then, came the next disaster: the loss of Garvey's lyric-book some 14 months after the LP's original release - and, thus, the disappearance of years of work, inclusive - most notably - of integral ideas for the band's second album. Bugger.
So, no: luck isn't one of Elbow's strengths. Rather more, and poignantly, it's the Manc quintet's lack of good fortune that proves most of interest - as the eventual release of their extravagant, starker second album 'Cast of Thousands' has proven.
Presumably via the torment of his life, Garvey has been blessed with an incredible gift of documenting tragedy. Coupled with the ingenuity and vision of his fellow performers, 'Cast of Thousands' is an intriguing, at times upsetting, but never less than fascinating excursion. The band's unique mιlange of tribal-like, primitive rhythmic-structures ('Snooks'), all-out, embracing, soar-pop ('Fallen Angel'), and the epics (an opening, colossally gospel-tinged 'Ribcage') make for a captivating, dramatic, vibrant and inescapably original voyage.
Magically, it's often what isn't performed that most impacts for Elbow (as proven on debut-LP highlight, 'Scattered Blacks & Whites') - a prime case on the new work, comprising the elevating, bare-arsed-soul of 'Switching Off', or a flourishing, wistful 'Fugitive Motel'. The remainder of the collection follows suit - content with gently intoxicating odes that envelope into sparse, engrossing arrangements ('Grace Under Pressure', with its 15,000-strong choral-chant of 'We still believe in love/So f**k you', as sung at Glastonbury 2002) and subtler, compact snapshots of sound: particularly the closing one-minute-48-seconds of 'Flying Dream 143' and an elegant, rolling, organ-tinged 'Not A Job' - almost hymn-like in its delivery.
So whilst the rest of the indie-influential get coked off their noggins with supermodels and rah-rah, C-list movie-actresses, pleasingly, Elbow continue their focussed and concentrated plight to soundtrack and detail the fascinating inner-workings of their implausibly deep and woeful souls. For the most part too, it results in another unavoidably coherent and compulsive body of work.
Artists in this article: Elbow
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