I'm a HUGE fan of Elbow. All of their albums have a unique flavor to them, while still sticking to their overarching style. Build A Rocket Boys! certainly does not disappoint in the slightest bit. It's a great follow-up to 2008's near-perfect The Seldom Seen Kid (my favorite Elbow album.) My only gripe with it is that it slows down about halfway through the album and never picks up the pace again. Open Arms begins to break out of the slow pace, but the second half still begins to feel like a Guy Garvey solo..
For the first time in their long career Elbow release an album as one of the mainstays of British music as opposed to a perennial aspiring contender. Its easy to forget that prior to the "Seldom Seen Kid" their album sales would not have been sufficient to fill a large Manchester pub as opposed to their recent epic homecoming gig at the Manchester Evening News Arena which was one of the most memorable nights in years. In every sense Seldom Seen Kid was a game changer for a band who had looked like they migh..
Everything you need to know about Build A Rocket Boys! you can gleam from the first two songs. The 8-minute opener, The Birds, is the longest the band has done, building slowly with pulsing guitar notes before opening up with bleep-blip Peter Gabriel synthesizers and, finally, a full-on orchestral explosion. The follow-up, Lippy Kids was the first taste of this album that Elbow gave us back around holiday time, and for good reason: musically and emotionally, it's the heart of the record, with Guy Garvey doi..
