I was writing about favorite UK rock bands the other day and I didn’t mention Elbow despite my serious love of them.
Why?
Two reasons:
1 – I couldn’t remember their name and kept on typing Foals (who I don’t love at all). In the end I forgot
And
2 – Well, actually, that was the only reason.
Elbow has a great mix of heavy duty anthem rock with an arty operatic sense and gottles of gear all over the place please one of our top front men in the business, Guy Garvey. Whenever any bothers me as to why I think somebody is a great or not great front man (pace James Bradfield), I’ll show you some film of Guy, a master lead singer and performer.
It’s been around a year since The Take Off And Landings Of Everything, and a really terrific live, and so finally here is some new material. The new material in question is a song for a romcom MAN directed by Ben Palmer (The Inbetweeners Movie) and starring Simon Pegg (Star Trek, Mission: Impossible 5, The World’s End) and Lake Bell (In a World, Million Dollar Arm). But really Pegg is the bloke from the greatest zombie movie ever ever made.
“What Time Do You Call This” sounds like a typical (but typical in a good way) swooning melancholy masterwork, like the National if the national were from the UK. It is prime Elbow, it isn’t “My Sad Captain”, but it is tasteful melodic gripper and yet another in their consistently awesome catalog of swooners.
The movie looks great by the way it aired four times during the “Tribeca Film Festival” and I wasn’t aware of it and missed them all.
What Time Do You Call This – Elbow – B+