Sold Date: November 1, 2015
Start Date: October 22, 2015
Final Price: £13.50 (GBP)
Bid Count: 12
Seller Feedback: 75
Buyer Feedback: 91

Fantastic Double LP. Hardly used!

Great 6th album from the Bury boys.

Guardian review below (4 stars)... Happy bidding!

"Here's a fact that might give you pause. It's been nearly six years since Elbow released One Day Like This, the track that catapulted them from alt-rock band of perenially middling status to something approaching national treasurehood. Perhaps it doesn't seem that long ago because One Day Like This is still omnipresent. When it's not being mercilessly deployed on televised sporting events and reality shows, it turns up when you're put on hold, someone having understandably decided that a song about a moment of sparkling transcendence so potent and unique it irrevocably alters the rest of your life is the perfect soundtrack for the sparkling, potent and irrevocably life-altering experience of waiting for Barry from the call centre to fetch his supervisor.

The song undoubtedly casts a long shadow over Elbow's career. But six years on, they're still playing the biggest venues in the country: their forthcoming tour takes in the O2, the SECC and the glamorously named Manchester Phones4U Arena. Even the most cynical naysayer might be forced to concede that you can't sustain that level of success for that long by milking a solitary hit, however ominpresent said solitary hit remains. Forty quid a ticket seems a lot of money to hear one song, particularly one you hear about three times a week, whether you want to or not.

Certainly, Elbow's sixth album sounds like the work of a band who've realised a mass audience loves them not for the big hit, but for what they really are, however improbable that seems: the stages trod by Rihanna and Coldplay and Michael Bublé are not really supposed to ring to the sound of a resolutely unglamorous prog-influenced band who seem to have taken as their musical starting point the gauzy textures and soulfully bruised but resolutely English vocals of Genesis's 1974 track The Carpet Crawlers. Unlike 2011's Build a Rocket Boys!, it offers no obvious attempt to recreate One Day Like This's rather atypical anthemics. The solitary moment of heavily orchestrated high drama comes on Charge, a bitterly witty depiction of a late thirtysomething realising there's a generation to whom he seems ancient: "Glory be/ These fuckers are ignoring me/ I'm from another century." Something approaching a mass singalong moment occurs on My Sad Captains, but there's an off-putting crunch of distorted noise behind it. It sounds uneasy, which fits with the song's equivocal view of middle-aged hedonism, a carefree "perfect waste of time" that still feels slightly undignified: there's a line about a "BMX apothecary" that conjures up the suitably incongruous image of the song's protagonist buying drugs off a kid on a bicycle.

Instead of pushing obvious buttons, The Take Off and Landing of Everything concentrates on what Elbow do best: Northern snug-philosopher wisdom – "In the arms that you love/ The peace that you'll feel's real life" – buoyed by music that's subtly expansive and adventurous, particularly by comparison with their arena-rock peers. Their love of prog doesn't manifest itself in tricky time signatures or roccoco virtuosity, and it certainly doesn't manifest itself in elaborate staging: the latter a shame for anyone keen to see Guy Garvey dispensing Northern snug-philosopher wisdom while dressed as a bulbous alien with inflatable genitals. Instead it seeps through in desire to keep their songs shifting in unpredictable directions. The closing The Blanket of Night teeters throughout on the brink of silence: when it finally does end, you sit there expecting it to burst back into life again. Opener This Blue World is seven minutes long, and the grand musical reveal doesn't arrive until two minutes before the end: the melody suddenly attains a beautiful, vertical lift-off, soaring somewhere you didn't expect it to go. The title track is disrupted by erratic busts of a keyboard sound that conjures up the improbable image of John Cale in his full, black-clad, centre-parted Mephistophelean White Light/White Heat pomp being let loose on a church organ.

The album does provide surprises, albeit of the eyebrow-raising rather than jaw-dropping variety: Honey Sun's diversion into electronica, Colour Fields' lyric, which features Garvey apparently counselling a provincial town's bombshell to leave and seek her fortune amid the bright lights. Given how much of Elbow's back catalogue is concerned with telling you that you're always happiest among the people and places you know best, this seems faintly startling, a bit like Motörhead releasing a song on which Lemmy gruffly insists his audience stick to the goverment's weekly guidelines for alcohol consumption and consider switching to e-cigarettes.

Elsewhere, New York Morning relocates Elbow from their usual Greater Manchester habitat to Manhattan, an unlikely move that turns out to be only partially successful. It's a nice enough song, but there are moments where it veers uncomfortably close to both the ever-present danger in Garvey's writing – that his unabashed sentimentality might turn a bit cloying and gloopy – and the ever-present danger in writing about the city, which involves succumbing to cliche: "Oh my giddy aunt, New York can talk." Still, the closing image is lovely: "The way the day begins decides the shade of everything/ But the way it ends depends on if you're home."

They may yet make a quintuple album that sounds like Skrillex, but Elbow don't really seem the kind of band that are ever going to throw a shocking curveball. They deal in solid dependability, a reliable standard of craftsmanship, rather than the springing of huge surprises. You could suggest that's a failing, but Elbow might reasonably point out that a resolutely unglamorous prog-influenced pub-philosopher quintet ending up one of Britain's biggest bands is a huge surprise in itself. And besides, when the standard of craftsmanship is as high as it is here – as when Fly Boy Blue/Lunette shifts from an idiosyncratic, Syd Barrettish ramble into a sweeping, gorgeous ballad topped off with a lyric that weighs up the pros and cons of giving up smoking – shocking curveballs don't really seem necessary.