Guy Garvey name-drops his mum on two of Leaders of the Free World's 11 tracks-- first time she makes an appearance is on the title track ("Your mum don't sleep!/ The friends you keep!/ I didn't raise a thief!"), and the second comes into play when "The streets are full of Goths and Greeks" and Garvey hasn't "seen [his] mum for weeks." Manchester-according-to-Elbow is the creepiest of locales-- take Asleep in the Back's "Any Day Now" and its broken record mantra: "Any day now, how's about getting out of this place?"-- so yearnings to crawl back to mummy or hit the road or, well, both, are understandable. Trademark Elbow is the languorous, brooding sort typified in 2001's Asleep in the Back and 2004's Cast of Thousands, but the band's third LP, Leaders of the Free World, leaves dankly gorgeous torpor mostly behind.
George W. Bush is at least partially to blame, if only for the title track, which references him near-explicitly: "Passing the gun from father to feckless son/ We're climbing a landslide where only the good die young." The song's primary gripe is fair enough: "The leaders of the free world/ Are just little boys throwing stones/ And its easy to ignore 'til they're knocking on the door of your homes." The idea that America's president is "spoilt, nasty, selfish little shit for brains" (says Garvey to the BBC) is nothing new, but Elbow's take is problematic: World affairs are easiest to tune out when said affairs don't directly concern themselves; by confessing so, Elbow inadvertently declare accusatory kinship to "little boys throwing stones."
The rest of the album flounders apolitically, as well. It's dull, for one thing. Why, pray tell, did Elbow decide to start sounding less like Radiohead rip-offs and more like midlife-crisis Travis? Leaders still intimates "Creep" in places, but it also garners new Brit bloke alignments: Past comparisons to Coldplay were probably undeserved, but present ones make sense. These guys are flirting with the seductively pointy fingernails of adult contemporary's harmless-but-gooey clutches.
Gone is the charming fog of Elbow-rock, replaced by cheery caveats against partying too hard ("Picky Bugger"). Brevity has never been their strong suit, but this is Elbow at their dullest shoe-cum-navel gazing. Complaints that tempos never changed on previous albums were valid circa Asleep in the Back, but irrelevant now: Speeding up hardly helps captivate. If the plan was to bait with catchier hooks, and exhume sentiment with slower, choir-backed ones, it flops ponderously. Fast song/slow song switch-offs seem contrived and go to show: Elbow do best when going with their (preferably gloomy) gut.
