Elbow are a great band but are not a James where you can almost listen to every trac k without wanting to push the forward button.
Almost? James? Really? I don’t possess a single recording by James, and have never heard anything of theirs that had an emotional impact that inspired me to do so. As far as listening to every track is concerned, Elbow, on the other hand, have something that encourages me to listen intently to every track, not just because Guy is a superb lyricist, but there’s always stuff going on in the mix that’s worth listening to, and in fact, out of hundreds of CD’s that I own, I can think of only one where I always skip a track, and that’s Industrial Disease, on Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold, the only album of theirs I own. I really dislike that track, it’s totally out of place and shatters the atmosphere when listening to the album. There are compilations where I skip tracks, but that’s different. I can see why people who are relatively new to the band might find the new album a bit lacking after the last couple which had a lot of more…epic songs, for want of a better term, but I think it’s a clever decision to step back and make a more intimate, thoughtful album. I think that for a lot of people who don’t *get* it, they’ll come back to it after a while and it’ll suddenly hit them. Just my thinking on it.