From Rochdale via "the man from La Mancha", the new album from Elbow is like every other with one significant difference. People have heard about them now, and from the cover of this month's NME it is Elbow's Guy Garvey, grasping a microphone and looking matter-of-factly, not a garish garbed bright young thing with lenseless specs. Mercury Music Prizes bestow mixed rewards upon recipients; Elbow found themselves playing with the BBC Concert Orchestra and having "One Day Like This" adopted as the television producers bed of choice for stirring images whenever usual choices Sigúr Ros or Coldplay were deemed no longer de rigueur. Not at all bad - or in character - for a band previously content with relative obscurity.
Following up "Seldom Seen Kid" with what must be the equivalent of the next novel after a Booker Prize, Elbow have shrugged their shoulders and brushed off everything they are comfortable playing. It's same-but-different, more rounded, spun with observation and realism, miserable but steadfast.
There are tracks on "Build a Rocket Boys!" that venture into territories both new and familiar. "High Ideals" concludes with a drunken fumble at a Tapas bar, all bar-room pianos and brass; "The Birds" whips up hotel room jazz into an over-bearing schalger. In "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl", the observational postcard from the North is as moving and honest as anything from Cherry Ghost or Richard Hawley, and from here through "Open Arms" and "Lippy Kids" new familiar favourites for fans long-standing and recently recruited.
At their best when enjoying allowing the little things to build into a whammer of a finish, this album revels in the ascending and the simplistic co-operating. "Lippy Kids" is a title which belies its real content, the nostalgia and world-weary, dour and determined. It's the Lancastrian way of expressing hope and if there's the hint of the reverential it is subtle - "angels" are namechecked across the album, the religious and the scientific alluded in the title and choral orchestration.
There was something of the happy accident about the way in which Elbow's trajectory shot upwards, and implied hints of returning to comfortable pastures with this album cannot be denied. It is a strong album, strong in texture and content, and perhaps deliberately there are no obvious repeats of end-credit hugging anthems. Unlike Leeds' Kaiser Chiefs, whose occasional stumbles into chart-bothering struggled to exit the laden guff of their albums, Elbow know better than to surround one sure-fire bet with also-ran material. "Build a Rocket Boys!" acts as reminder and threat, as a thank-you to the Mercury and all it has allowed, but tellingly also a hat-tip to the crowds waiting for more they could recognise. It deserves as much attention and praise, though could do just as well with neither.
