Elbow's Subtle & Rewarding Allure

This week, Elbow's Seldom Seen Kid has been my go to album. It's strangely hypnotic sounds and rhythms gradually grow on you with each listen. I first became aware of them riding around the Tube in London. Posters for a summer music festival touted them as headliners. My curiosity peaked, I downloaded this 2008 release as soon as I got home from my trip. However, It took me about a two weeks to really get into the album. At first only two songs grabbed me: Mirrorball and Grounds For Divorce. The first is a lilting, airy number built around a looping piano part that guides you through a musical cosmos of strings, soulful chorus vocals and spacey guitars. Grounds For Divorce begins as a bluesy stomper, but swiftly slides into a poppy chorus that explodes into a heavy rock riff a la Radiohead. These two songs are but a sampling of the diverse sounds and concepts captured in this sleeper of an album.

At first, I found myself too distracted to listen to the entire album. I'd sit still for Mirrorball, but quickly find myself selecting something more immediate or uptempo - like last week's pick: Ian Dury & The Blockheads.

One night I went to sleep listening to the album with headphones and I think it did something to me on a deeply subliminal level. I awoke with a vague notion of the songs, but couldn't really remember any of the specifics - just an overall sense of the music. Subsequent listenings allowed the more subtle, mysterious portions of the album to come alive for my ears - Weather to Fly and Some Riot.

Stumbling on an album like this has deep rewards. The process of "getting it" has been really interesting, causing me to think about music in different ways and to reassess my own tastes.

Elbow, a Mancunian outfit (seriously, what's in the water up there?), is a band in the vein of Radiohead or Coldplay, but not really. The vocalist, Guy Garvey (an admitted Peter Gabriel era Genesis fanatic) does sound a lot like Peter Gabriel in some moments.

Check out this live video of Mirrorball performed with the BBC Concert Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios - a lovely arrangement.