Elbow
Giants Of All Sizes
Polydor
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Giants Of All Sizes, Elbow’s eighth studio album, is not an easy listen. But these are decidedly not easy times we find ourselves in at the moment.
In reviewing its precursor, 2017’s Little Fictions, I referred to it as “an album about the redemptive power of love and romance, with a valiant optimism, defiance, and sense of renewal pervasive throughout,” adding that it “reminds us that the human spirit is still alive and kicking, radiating a much-needed warmth in a world that feels increasingly cold and disconnected.”
Unfortunately, and at the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, the state of the world—broadly speaking—has not improved in the nearly three years since the Manchester band’s inspired seventh LP made landfall. And this sobering reality is far from lost on Guy Garvey, Pete Turner and brothers Craig and Mark Potter.
A sweeping musical and lyrical statement about loss on both the macro (global) and micro (personal) levels, Giants Of All Sizes succeeds in eloquently synthesizing the disenchantment that many of us feel, as the ceaseless absurdity of the Brexit and Trump era continues gnawing away at our increasingly weary souls. “Everyone is fucked, so it’s a dark record,” Garvey recently explained to The Sun. “And we are a band not known for that. We are known for the opposite, but I don’t want to listen to happy music when I am sad. You want something to connect to. Giants Of All Sizes is a record of the times.”
Consistent with its lyrical composition, the soundscapes that underpin much of Giants Of All Sizes are also notably heavier and more foreboding when juxtaposed with the band’s previous output. This is heard right out of the gate with the epic, seven-minutes-strong album opener “Dexter & Sinister,” an industrial, piano-sprinkled dirge reminiscent of “Leaders Of The Free World” from the 2005 album of the same name and “Grounds For Divorce” from 2008’s Mercury Prize-winning The Seldom Seen Kid. As Garvey laments “I've the heaviest heart jackhammering in me / And I don't know Jesus anymore,” the arrangement builds momentum toward a multi-layered, shapeshifting climax bolstered by Jesca Hoop’s soaring vocals. Arguably a bit jarring upon initial listen, “Dexter & Sinister” emerges as one of Elbow’s grandest fulfillments of their musical ambition upon a few presses of the repeat button.
“Empires crumble all the time / Pay it no mind,” Garvey reflects with a stoic candor on the sobering, organ-driven “Empires,” his casual remark belying the weight and consequence of such monumental shifts in the world order as America, the United Kingdom and Europe on the whole limp toward their uncertain futures.
Inspired by the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in West London, the poignant “White Noise White Heat” is propelled by Garvey’s veiled commentary and quietly restrained rage about the socio-economic forces and “white heat of injustice” that enabled such a calamitous event to transpire, with the poor its helpless victims. “The slow erosion of civil liberties has led to health and safety checks not being carried out and poor people not being looked after and burning to death on account of people cutting corners,” Garvey recently insisted to The Sun. “And no one will go to jail for that.”
A different type of tragedy informs “The Delayed 3:15,” Garvey’s anecdotal recollection of a train ride interrupted by a man who took his life beneath the steel machine’s wheels. While the mundanity of the passengers’ lives safe and sound in the cars above the blood-stained tracks continue unabated and unaffected by the grisly suicide scene, Garvey expresses genuine empathy for the stranger’s plight (“I tried to find your name / You didn't make the news / You're just the man whose blues / Stopped his heart beneath our shoes”).
The darkness of the album’s first two-thirds dissipates in its concluding trio of more sanguine songs, each an understated reverie that offers hope and solace in the face of such pervasive disillusionment. “My Trouble” is Garvey’s endearing ode to his wife, as he confides, “Just this morning alone with you worth / A lifetime alone on this earth,” later adding, “There will come a time when you and I / Are invisible to all but you and me / And I'll sing each line that appears with the years / 'Til there's countless rings on our proud old tree.” Utterly devoid of pretense or contrivance, Garvey’s heartfelt lyrics suggest that the love he possesses for his wife derives from the power of steadfast conviction, reminding us that we should all be so lucky to have reason to say words like this to another.
A similar sentiment is applied to a different object of Garvey’s affection with “On Deronda Road.” Basked in enveloping harmonies reminiscent of peak Crosby, Stills & Nash or more recently, Fleet Foxes, Garvey revels in the recounting of a jaunt with his young son, singing, “This day is made of hope and space / And home like I have never known / I found it in your perfect face / When we were on Deronda Road.” It’s a simple message, but one that immediately resonates, as I think of my own two daughters and how I’m never as happy as I am when I’m with them.
Informed by the recent passing of Garvey’s father and addressed to his son, the stirring “Weightless” closes the album by celebrating the connective threads that run through generations (“Hey / You look like me / So we / Look like him / When the time came / Just like you are / He was weightless / In my arms”). “It was so easy to love [my father] in the end, where it hadn't always been," Garvey recently confided to NPR. "You know, I think most people have a complicated relationship with at least one of their parents. But towards the end, in the tangle and the summing up of the man, he was a great bloke. And [my son's] arrival made dad's passing part of life rather than the end of it."
As with Elbow’s sterling recorded repertoire that precedes it, Giants Of All Sizes solidifies the band’s proven penchant for merging the pragmatic with the romantic to craft songs that stay with you, long after the needle is lifted from the record. And while the bulk of the album’s thematic inspiration may not spring from the most uplifting of fodder, the nine songs contained therein give much-needed voice and validation to the wide spectra of emotions that currently keep our world—and our lives—spinning.
Notable Tracks: "Dexter & Sinister" | “The Delayed 3:15” | "Weightless"
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