Elbow frontman Guy Garvey has been splitting his time lately between Brooklyn and his native England. Accordingly, there’s an atmosphere of perpetual suspension and too many transatlantic flights to the band’s sixth full-length The Take Off and Landing of Everything. Not that Garvey, from the album’s title on down, seems to be trying to encrypt that theme. After the morbid nostalgia of 2011’s Build a Rocket Boys!, there’s a softer, rounder, lighter obviousness to Take Off. The arrangements are even more porous; the melodies less terrestrial. But where Build a Rocket Boys! meditated on youth, the new album dwells on, well, take offs and landings as analogs of life and death like that parallel is the most clever thing anyone’s ever thought of.
Yes, Garvey’s symbology has gotten that much more sodden and heavy-handed, even as Take Off steadfastly sheds mass. On “Fly Boy Blue/ Lunette”, he’s traded in his rockets for the drudgery of commercial flight with all its degradation of wonder. Garvey’s in-flight movie may have been Up in the Air one too many times. Singing “I’m reaching the age where decisions are made on the life and the liver," he falls back on the bottle as a totem of existential boredom. His voice itself—numb, null, narcotic—spreads its warmth around that imagistic mixology. “So bring your faces/ Home to my sweet trampoline/ And acres of crash site love," he waxes later in “Fly Boy Blue/ Lunette”, and only the song’s bittersweet orchestral swells save it from falling out of the sky.
Moments of greatness come, just not often enough. The contorted syncopation and signature-twiddling of “Charge”—as well as its thick keys and dehydrated guitar—establish some real counterpoint and tension, elements the album otherwise mostly lacks. And Garvey’s in-character narrative summons pathos, tangible rage, and the entitled bitterness of old age and memory. He bites off words, chews them, spits; Roger Waters circa The Final Cut might have been proud. It complements Take Off’s other standout, its title track, a wash of throbbing, “Tomorrow Never Knows”-esque psychedelia that also channels Garvey’s most open inspiration of late, Peter Gabriel.
Those gains are almost entirely erased by lusterless lumps like “Honey Sun”, a song that begins promisingly with a clip of off-the-cuff studio hijinks before devolving into Elbow’s longtime default setting: a discrete if uninentional reimagining of Blur’s “Tender,” in all its crowd-baiting, platitudinous blankness. “Can I jump in the gun/ And fly/ Over the ocean” goes Garvey’s obligatory air-travel reference as he lands his 747-sized sentimentalism right on the nose. Perhaps it’s deliberate that throughout The Take Off and Landing of Everything, hardly anything truly takes off. Instead the album dangles there, an effortlessly leaden exhibition of glum triumphalism—and an example of what makes Elbow, at its least potent, so subtly unsubtle.
