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By Lisa Y. Garibay Making room Its so good to be back! enthused vocalist Guy Garvey says to a throng of eager fans packing the Avalon for Elbows performance last month. Although the U.K.-based five-piece hadnt played a show in L.A. in almost three years, the city holds special significance for the group considering they chose to come here to finish their latest album. And during the Avalon show, it was clear that the band was relishing the chance to be back in front of fans on the West Coast just as much as the audience they were playing to. Backtrack just a few years to when Elbows 2001 debut, Asleep In the Back, won explosive praise, a nomination for Britains prestigious Mercury prize and topped critics lists around the world. Second record, A Cast of Thousands, had them playing sell-out shows and topping Glastonbury in 2004 as they desperately tried to balance maturing personal relationships. The band is not a gaggle of wide-eyed youngsters: Garvey, guitarist Mark Potter, keyboardist Craig Potter, bassist Pete Turner, and drummer Richard Jupp have been a unit for 15 years now and three of them are nurturing young families. This settling-down mentality contributed to the groups decision to record Leaders of the Free World, released earlier this year on V2, close to home at Blueprint Studios in Manchester. While Leaders demonstrates the rich melodies and variety that have always been Elbow trademarks, fans familiar with their previous work will notice a definite shift towards more straightforward songs, both technically and artistically. We did an awful lot of experimentation and we stripped away what we didnt feel was necessary, says Garvey. There are choirs and crowds and strings and trumpets and whistles and bells all over the previous two records, lots of production experiments. We wanted to do something a lot simpler and more intimate for Leaders. But the band also likes to keep things interesting hence the decision to go halfway round the world for the rest of the record. Towards the end we decided that we needed to seek an objective outside opinion to help us mix it and that would draw out things that perhaps we were taking for granted in the mix, Garvey recalls. Tom Rothrock was invited to Manchester to witness the bands creative process which involved the simultaneous production of a DVD by pals Soup Collective. The band gelled with Rothrock and he suggested they finish the record with him in Los Angeles. I think swapping our view of Strangeways prison [in Manchester], which was made famous by the Smiths, for the Hollywood sign, which you can see from the windows of Toms studio, allowed us to have a real sense of objectivity about our home, which is a big theme of the record, Garvey says. The other theme of Leaders of the Free World is its political commentary, which Garvey is proud to promote despite the fact that Elbow isnt known for being an activist act. The whole of the world is on high alert and I think in those situations everybody has a duty to their race to at least consider their political opinion, he explains. Im also very aware that the worlds media is very tightly controlled. I know we get angles on stories and stories are given attention in this country that theyre not in the States, which is very disturbing, and I consider it my duty as a human being to at least put our hand up and say which camp we were in. That said, Leaders of the Free World is far from being of a bunch of soapbox rhetoric; it is a gorgeous record, perhaps the bands strongest to date, demonstrating care, creativity and dedication which is how Garvey accounts for the bands endurance after all these years. They never stop surprising me as musicians, and weve grown very close, he says. Even at times when perhaps individuals in the outfit havent been getting on with each other and you know some of those times are years long in the past theres always been an overriding respect for each other as musicians and thats such a strong bond. On the web: www.elbow.co.uk |
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Copyright © 2002 Mean Street Magazine, LLC |
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