Ever since 2008’s Mercury Prize-winning The Seldom Seen Kid, Elbow have offered slight tweaks on a reliable formula: meditative, dramatic rock songs, studded with sweeping orchestration and boasting subtly idiosyncratic songwriting. At this point, they may not win many more new fans stateside (or elsewhere), but as they age, they are settling into this groove, one that deepens slowly with more years passed and miles traveled.
Their last album, 2014’s The Take Off and Landing of Everything, catalogued the mixture of life changes that come with adulthood, but was specifically shaped by the end of frontman Guy Garvey’s long-term relationship with the writer Emma Jane Unsworth. An album blurred between places and times, it found Garvey writing from a place of increasingly crowded memory. Their new album Little Fictions picks up those threads, with a few more years behind them as touring musicians. Living that way has a certain effect: other people’s live drift out of yours and seem to settle into place, while yours keeps rushing forward but also remains static in its own way, with you simply replacing old characters with new ones. Much of the album outlines love lost, love percolating, love maturing. And, as always, Garvey is a skilled chronicler of human interaction, offering a manifesto for the album in its penultimate title track: “We protect our little fictions/Like it’s all we are.”
Unlike its predecessor—where the weight of the past sometimes bogged down the tempos, too—Little Fictions moves. Lead single and opening track “Magnificent (She Says)” rides on a nimble guitar figure and string arrangement. The drum pattern in “Gentle Storm” wouldn’t feel out of place in a club, were it not for the beautifully ruminative song that surrounds it. Though at their most insistent Elbow still mostly operate at “purposeful stride,” a song like “Firebrand & Angel” combines off-kilter elements to achieve a forward-momentum lurch.
Even at their most emotionally bombastic—in huge orchestral sweeps like “One Day Like This” or the slow-intensifying koan of “The Take Off and Landing of Everything”—Elbow write songs with a careful architecture. And now, perhaps more so than ever, the affecting moments of their new material are rooted in very precise decisions, like the interplay of piano and percussion in “Gentle Storm.” One of the most striking examples here is the vocal layering in “All Disco” and “K2.” Abstracted, ghostly background vocals bubble in the background throughout “All Disco” until they finally boil over and mingle with Garvey’s, a manifestation of memory overtaking and reshaping your perception of the present. “K2,” the album’s highlight, pulls a similar trick. One long unhurried tumble (its verses and chorus elide together), it finds Garvey in a reverie, eager to unspool but doing so in many directions at once; the moments and places listed are far-flung. Throughout, his vocals echo themselves in the distance, slightly out-of-step with the main vocal performance. It’s a watercolor representation of life passing and the experiences you collect, making the clarity of repeated lines like “Opens the fist just enough for a hand/To slip into the hand” hit harder.
Little Fictions is full of moments like this, where discrete flourishes yield quietly resounding payoffs. Sometimes it’s easy to wish Elbow would let a different kind of intensity in—that the storm wasn’t always so gentle. But that's not really what Elbow do, and this many albums in, they know what they do well. They still excel in melancholic music about loss and love. But these days, wide-eyed wonder is always around the corner. “Then my telephone shakes into life I see your name,” Garvey sings towards the end of closer “Kindling” (a song that plays like U2 in their lowest-key), before the repetition of “Then the wheat fields explode into gold either side of the train,” as the final lines of the album. In a different group’s hands, it’d all be too mawkish. But as Elbow settle into middle age, the additional wrinkles and whiskey stains only deepen the gravity of their stories.
