ELBOW - Build A Rocket Boys!

"Help the aged", Pulp's lead singer Jarvis Cocker once sang, and it's a lesson that fellow English gents Elbow seem to have taken to heart on their fifth album. Guaranteed, no other album this year will have a lyric rhyming "adventures" with "dentures", and if one does, it’s likely it won’t mean it as sincerely as they do here.

The Bury quintet have never been the most youthful or hip of bands—even when they were pegged as one of about a dozen 'new Radioheads' back in 2001 with their excellent debut Asleep At The Back, they were informed more by cerebral forefathers like Peter Gabriel and Talk Talk's Mark Hollis than the Thom-Yorke-fronting-U2 of Coldplay or Starsailor. Furthermore, much like the decor at your grandma's, their music had a habit of always being presented just so. That goes there. This goes over here. Hardly Top Of The Pops.

What saved the band from being overly stodgy and stiff were that such orderly presentation was done in service of some excellent songwriting (with the occasional musical choice being just inventive enough to surprise), and their singer, Guy Garvey. Garvey possesses a voice laden with snarky wit, wry humour, heart-bursting power, and the most eloquent of phrasing. The man is capable of wrenching purity out of even the most saccharine and overused sentiments—highly useful seeing as Elbow are, if anything, a rather sentimental band.

But by making an album that is essentially all about youth, old age, and the chasm of understanding and perspective that exists between them, a near Herculean task has been placed on Garvey’s shoulders: making an album about such things compelling. To make the stakes even higher, the undersung rhythm section of drummer Richard Jupp and bassist Pete Turner—often responsible for both the band’s most hypnotic and exhilarating sequences in the past—are given conspicuously little to do on Build a Rocket Boys!. Instead, much of the album relies on the band’s other strong suit: that of highly patient, delicately handled poetic pop.

All four of Elbow’s past albums have come out of the gate strongly, and Rocket is no exception. "The Birds" is an eight-minute stunner—the kind of slowburning song that Elbow have managed to perfect over their tenure—featuring in equal measure taut, spare rhythms; lush, pastoral beauty; and a complete range of emoting from tender whispers to full-throated pleas. And all without ever becoming too maudlin or too cheery. And while second track "Lippy Kids" has decidedly less range to it, it similarly says so many poignant things without resorting to cliché that the opening combination really is a total knockout. All of which makes what follows a bit of a letdown at times.

Tracks like "With Love" and first single "Neat Little Rows" have the goods to be the intriguing meditations on mortality and friendship they aspire to be, but get bogged down in some heavy-handed decisions (an everyman’s choir and overly dramatic keyboard stabs, respectively). Then settling into a five-song midsection of uniformly low-key numbers, it would appear that this Rocket’s initial rush is made to fade fast.

But this is where Elbow’s hard-won maturity comes to the fore. In lesser hands, the drifting "The Night Will Always Win" or nearly a cappella "The River" would flatline the album completely. Instead, here is where the band is arguably at their most potent. Sure, it takes some belief on the part of the listener, but damn if it isn’t a sacrifice worth making. By the time the choir is making its second prominent appearance, in the appropriately arms-raised conclusion of "Open Arms", the album is in full flight again, this time making terrific use of the added vocal heft.

This is Elbow’s first album since winning a well-deserved (if still surprising) Mercury Prize for 2007’s The Seldom Seen Kid. It’s surely not something lost on these vets, who have slogged it out in Britain’s indie trenches long enough to have believed they’d never see days like this. That Build A Rocket Boys! lacks any sense of trying to capitalize on that success with a single-heavy, arena-sized album is honourable and all, but you could also rightly accuse the boys of simply not being up to the task. After all, love them or hate them, Coldplay certainly took the bull by the horns when the chance came and proved that they could write some moment-worthy songs in the process.

But Elbow have always been a far more complex band than that, and if Rocket proves nothing else, it’s that these five men are more than comfortable risking most listeners missing their point, as long as it means they can make it clearly to some. So when the record concludes, it is not with hyperbolic bluster, but with a brief reprise of "The Birds" (sung unpretentiously by an amateur piano tuner named John Moseley) and "Dear Friends", an homage to the most tender and enduring of bonds we humans can forge. Humble and rich in unflinching emotion, moments like this—not a potential radio single—is why Elbow matter. Credit them hugely for still having the good sense to know that.