The Seldom Seen Kid Reviews

A slight warning to all readers: this is moreso an analysis of the album rather than a review that aids you in deciding wether or not to purchase this. It's more about what I think the songs are about etc. If you want a review with a list of the good and bad things, run off to Metacritic or something.

Ok, let's get one thing straight; I appreciate the action-paced, fast and good-sounding rock music as much as the next guy. I love it when there's a song that I can mosh to (or would mosh to if I had half the hair to do it). But sometimes I just really get tired of it. There's only so many bursts of energy I can bother listening to before it gets old. That's why I love bands like Elbow. It provides me something to listen to during the pauses in faster music I suffer of every once in a while. Let's get on with the album right away; It starts off with a track that ranks in my books as one of the best first songs in any album in a decade or so; it's called Starlings, and I suspect that it's a story about love, like many other songs. Why it works as an opener for the album is because of two reasons. 1) It has this bizarre prelude-like sound to it throughout. There's about two minutes of instrumental sounds before any singing is heard, and when it does the song doesn't really reach a peak until the four minute mark, but even when it gets louder, Starlings remains relatively calm-paced, as if preparing use for what might come later. 2) It's a bloody great song. As you might know, I'm a lyrics guy. I enjoy good lyrics more than anything else in music. This is a different type of love song, and the lyrics certainly assert to that. It's a love song written to people who are at their thirties, are broken, scarred and burnt by love. People who view love from a cynical perspective. In the song, a man like this falls in love with a young woman. The woman understands his point of view in the matter, but still loves him. It's fun, and it's different. The second song, named Bones Of You, is about lost love instead of active love. It's about how hard it is to us to forget about true love. Abandoning it is a hard task, and this song is about trying to do so, but ultimately failing. It contains some fantastic lyrical parts, such as
But image on image like beads on a rosary
pulled through my head as the music takes hold
and the sickener hits
Which is about the man trying to forget but yet again failing to do so as the memories come back (the memories=the sickener in this case). Musically it's far more fast-paced than Starlings, and contains an overall rockier tune anyhow. There is one thing to note though; it never feels like singer Guy Garvey really speeds up his singing even though the song otherwise is what it is. He does go rather high-pitch occasionally, which isn't always a positive feat, but never really becomes annoying despite mostly keeping the same tone throughout the entire song.

I personally think the third song, Mirrorball, is the worst in the entire album. The problem is not the song itself, but rather it's placing. It's very similar to Starlings, even though it contains more lyrics. Starlings is a song that works just and just on it's own, and because it's followed by a faster song, it feels as if the song is good. But then right after the faster Bones of You, we go back to this slow, murky tone, and it doesn't work too well. It's just too fast. So yeah, the song is a lot like Starlings in music, maybe just a bit faster, but it's still one of the more or less slow songs of the album. The lyrics are very good yet again, this time not being so much about love in a physical, true love-type manner, but instead being about the love a parent feels towards a newborn baby. It's a very touching song if interpreted as a tune about how most newfound moms and dads feel after the birth of their child. Good thing that The Seldom Seen Kid pumps up the speed after this one, because otherwise one might fall asleep while listening to it. Next up we have a song named Grounds For Divorce. It's really obvious that the song is about alcoholism, but it's unique with the subject with the approach it takes lyrically. It speaks of alcoholisation in an almost Lynchian-manner, creating surreal landscapes into the minds of listeners with the lyrics. It's also been suggested that this song is also about losing a loved one in a bad way, but I don't know if that interpretation necessarily fits in with the lyrics all that well. As far as the music goes, you can decide for yourself as to wether or not this is a good track. Since it was the first single from the album, here's a youtube link to it: Listen to Grounds For Divorce. I think it works succesfully in amping up the album's tone after the slow Mirrorball, and it's fun to listen to even as a loose entity, separate from the album itself. Speaking of fun to listen to, just want until you get a load of the next song; An Audience With The Pope sounds very interesting. It's got a catchy chorus with a cool piano tune in the background and good, solid lyrics throughout. Music-wise, this is perhaps the most complicated and one of the best songs in The Seldom Seen Kid. The elaborate combination of various instruments to create nice and danceable music sounds great, as does Garvey's singing here. The lyrics are about love (ain't that shocking), moreso about being madly in love with someone who simply abuses you constantly, making you miss something more important just because you want to be together with her... It's sad in that sense.

Now then, I have three songs on this album that in my opinion are the best things this album has to offer, and perhaps the best that Elbow has to offer to it's listeners. The first of these songs is the sixth on the album, named Weather To Fly. It's a weird song, different from most I've ever heard. Weather To Fly starts by asking a series of questions:
Are we having the time of our life?
Are we having the time of our lives?
Are we coming across clear?
Are we coming across fine?
Are we part of the plan here?
Are we having the time of our lives?
Are we coming across clear?
Are we coming across fine?
Are we having the time of our lives?
Are we part of the plan here?
These questions can be taken in two ways; either they're questions that we should ask ourselves about our lives, which is the theory I prefer, or then it could be considered that Garvey is infact asking us, the listeners, what we think of the band as a whole. The rest of the song is a story; it's a story about how Elbow became Elbow. About how the members met. How they decided to start making music. I personally consider this a bold choice to make an entire song about, and the most bizarre things is, it works. This song sounds damn near perfect. It has an optimistic, but realistically so, sound to it with the singing and music being in a positive harmony with each other. Weather To Fly sounds great, it asks us questions we should think about, and tells a story most bands get to tell in interviews and biographies; Elbow made a song about it. I love it.

Now, after a great song, a good song follows. Not as good as the previous one, it still works as a predecessor for Weather To Fly. It's name is bizarre, and is very fun to pronounce for some reason. It's called The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver. TLTCD is about loosing touch with normal life, reality, and becoming lonely through success. Story goes that the lead singer used to be a tower crane driver, and his company had others like him as well. One of them was somehow more successfull than the others; he had a TV, a microwave etc. in his tower crane, making him successfull, but the other drivers loathed him because of his success. TLTCD is the story of that man. It sounds very melancholic and silent. That's really all that I can say about this song as a whole, because that's all there is to it musically. Next up we have a fast song for a change; The Fix is almost a pop song in it's rhythm, occasionally falling to the level of bizarre blues songs with the pacing. The sound is reminiscent of some scrapped Pink Floyd-song, which isn't bad at all. The story with the song could be one of many. I have no idea what it's about. The name and some lines indicate that it's about drug abuse, but then some lines make it seem like it was about gambling. To be honest I don't care so much as to what it's about, I just love listening to it. It's very calm, but not so calm that you would fall asleep or anything, as it is pretty fast. But it keeps a pace up. It isn't uneven. It's calm, yet fast. I hope you understand my point there.

Remember what I said about Weather To Fly? That there are three truly great songs in this album? Well, the ninth track, named Some Riot, is the second of the three amigos. This is by far the most depressing song on the entire album, and it sounds delicious. Maybe it's my melancholic finnish mindset, but this song really breaks into my heart and grabs it. Some Riot is captivating and wonderfully depressing. The lyrics are about a topic already tackled earlier on in the album. Guess what they're about? No, not love. I knew you'd guess that! It's about alcoholism. To be specific, it's about seeing someone very close to you drink themselves into a pit of no return. Ruining themselves willingly. Not stopping. Never stopping. And it's beautiful. Sure, it's sad as hell, but it's hard not to be moved by the way it's sung of here. Now, prepare yourself for one of the best song placings I can quickly recall. After listening to several minutes of very depressing material with Some Riot, comes the third in my list of the best songs Elbow has made. It's named One Day Like This, and boy does it kick ass. Imagine that you're depressed. What do you do? You try to get cheered up. That's what One Day Like This does. It cheers you up after a melancholic blabber of words. Unsurprisingly it's a love song. I like to think it's about that moment when you suddenly go "Holy shite, I do love you" in the middle of watching CSI on TV (I mean you say that to your girlfriend, not Gil Grissom). The sound is what makes it so good to listen to, full of life, vibrance and optimism like an apple pie baked by that Kool-Aid jug in the middle of fucking Rainbowland. I can't speak much of it, but do listen to it if you wish to: Listen to One Day Like This. We still have one song left on the album; Friends of Ours. It lasts for 4 and a half minutes and has about 11 sentences sung during that time. It's a song dedicated to the memory of Bryan Glancy; a musician who was friends with the band, and died during the making of the album. The lyrics are heartfelt and sad, and I feel they do justice to Glancy himself. However I can not review this song; it wouldn't feel correct to me to review something this personal. It's good. I'll just say that. It's touching as well. Very touching.

In the end what you have left from The Seldom Seen Kid is the experience of listening to possibly one of the best albums of 2008, and some of the best written songs I have heard in years. I love this album, and I truly hope you check it out even if this review didn't light an "Elbowspark" in you. VT out.