January 16, 2001

Single of the week - ELBOW : Any Day Now EP

It's great, but it sounds like everything is very far from great for the musicians...

Bury the hatchet? Elbow are the hatchet from Bury: life is long, life is bleak, life is not altogether great. Still, then you cheer up a bit and think about how much worse it all would be if you were unemployed and lived in a grim north western town. Oh. You do. Aaaaagh.

The story of Elbow is not an altogether cheerful one. Their epic and mournful music has attracted the attention of not one, but two major label contracts, but wouldn't you just know it (well, maybe if you're Elbow, you would, you'd come to expect it), they up and leave you (likewise, maybe Elbow have come to expect that too). Help, though, is at hand: an indie label decides to put out two of your records, and then hey hey hey! things start looking up again.

'Any Day Now' is the second of these records. It's great, but it sounds like everything is very far from great for the musicians. Guy Garvey wails as a dark and faintly trip-hop beat commences, "Any day now/How's about getting out of this place?" Well, fair enough.

Elbow are not afraid of building an atmosphere (in here there's everything from Radiohead to post-rock), but have an idea how to do this pretty tunefully too. And, of course, very sadly indeed.

Elbow are The Beta Blocker Band. They're Dead Doves. Happily, though, that bird can sing, and it may well even fly, too.

John Robinson