Elbow - Asleep in the Back (2001)

1) Any Day Now; 2) Red; 3) Little Beast; 4) Powder Blue; 5) Bitten by the Tailfly; 6) Asleep in the Back; 7) Newborn; 8) Don’t Mix Your Drinks; 9) Presuming Ed (Rest Easy); 10) Coming Second; 11) Can’t Stop; 12) Scattered Black and Whites

Brooding, dark and about to shatter into pieces. A quiet start completely at odds with what the band would come to represent later on, but there's beauty in its sadness.

 

Key tracks: "Powder Blue", "Newborn", "Scattered Black and Whites" 

 

Let’s imagine a situation with a fair sprinkle of album anthropomorphism thrown in. There’s a bar. Not the sort of neighbourhood pub from Cheers or Emmerdale, but a bar. You’ve got all the regulars there, wasting the hours away with a drink and company, the jukebox in the corner playing some old hit songs from years behind. At the darkest corner of the bar counter is a man. He’s surrounded by several empty pint glasses and there’s another one in front of him, well past half empty. Look closely and you can just about see how he tries to hide the occasional tear falling into his drink. Everybody leaves him alone and the man mutters quietly to himself with a sullen, defeated tone. That man is Asleep in the Back.

Skip a number of years into the future, and Elbow had started to enjoy a grand old time being the nation’s darlings thanks to The Seldom Seen Kid becoming a huge (and deserved) success story and the few sing-along hits off it having turned into TV and stadium staples. Guy Garvey and his big Northern grin have united the nation with their love and warmth. For a while Elbow were the poster boys of “we can make it” attitude and they’re going to be basking in that glory forevermore even after the actual hits have diminished. In contrast, the drunken, bitter depression of Asleep in the Back is so stark that it’d be funny if the album actually wasn’t so sad. It comes from a period when a depressed, out of control Garvey was sabotaging his own relationships in order to get more inspiration for the lyrics for his band: that could all very well be hearsay but you listen to him here and you can fully believe it. The band themselves were drifting aimlessly as well, having been together for a good decade with little results to come out of it, having already recorded one debut album but which had never seen the light of day due to label issues. Eventually, after a number of EPs and a lot of struggle, they finally manage to release a full-length debut.

Asleep in the Back isn’t the kind debut that proudly announces the arrival of a new, glorious act. Rather, it crawled out into the world and immediately withdrew to the shadows.

The Elbow present here are far from the warm smiles and crowd-raising anthems of their future selves. The key elements of the sound lie in sparse yet deep bass riffs, shuffling drums and an almost ever-present organ, all frequently locked to quiet tempos and melancholy notes. Whenever the pace does increase, it goes chaotic and loud. Garvey sounds completely broken: his delivery is full of ache and his lyrics even moreso, with little in the way of light and comfort in-between all the introspection and personal disorder. Asleep in the Back is focused on the mood, full of extended soundscapes that linger rather than get your foot tapping. It works – the atmosphere is Asleep in the Back’s signature element and Elbow create a compelling album with it. Several tracks are even dedicated to it: “Don’t Mix Your Drinks” and “Presuming Ed (Rest Easy)” are more akin to sonic textures with vocals.

However, the heart and soul of Asleep in the Back is its emotional nudity. The band are fantastic and their already significant experience shows in the masterful usage of their respective instruments, but Garvey brings the humanity on the table and all the resonance that comes with it. His audible ache and pent-up masculine agony are all over the album, from the defeated mutters of “Red” to the pained falsettos and eery sighs of “Powder Blue”. On “Bitten by the Tailfly” he comes across downright creepy and definitely sleazy (though the song is a tour de force for the rest of the band too, especially in its furious horn-accented finale), while on the lullaby-like “Presuming Ed (Rest Easy)” he for once acts as the comforting shoulder rather than someone who needs one. On “Newborn” he soars – in fact, the whole band does as the song builds into its thundering, enormous finale of sound that washes over majestically. It’s a stadium-sized Elbow but not as you know it, and the whole of the song from its effortlessly beautiful first half to its storming climax is among the album’s crowning moments. Arguably, among Elbow’s in general.

Yet, the album’s best songs are its gentler ones: the brief flashes of light at the end of the tunnel where that emotional vulnerability gets a rest stop for some strength to carry on. “Scattered Black and Whites” especially, which closes the album with a heavy-harted happiness. It’s the healing hand after all the darkness preceding it: a song about coming home and finding a quiet oasis where you can rest from all the turmoil and chaos. The music backs the sentiment with a delicate, melodic touch and it’s the exact perfect way to end the album with: in a beautiful, hopeful bliss that picks it up right as it’s about bid farewell. “Scattered Black and Whites” is way up there among Elbow’s top rank tracks and I’m completely honest about how it’s partly because it resonates so heavily within my world-weary heart long way from home. The album’s other key highlight in this department has a similar delicate touch, even though the song is a cunningly disguised bitter bastard: the title track “Asleep in the Back” flutters away on top of its sheer loveliness, with some sublime melodic passages and horn sections. Sure, it’s a song about the unpleasant aftermath of opening up about your worst points to someone you care about and it carries an accusatory tone over it, but it sounds so peaceful and lovely in contrast that it’s hard not to adore it. The contrast works for the song’s benefit, in all honesty – the lack of any negativity in its sound makes Garvey’s narrator persona sound even colder.

“Asleep in the Back” is coincidentally also one of the album’s two bonus tracks – although calling them bonus tracks at this stage seems a bit dishonest as they’ve been weaved in the middle of the tracklist and all the standard editions of the album now come with them, as if the original release had a few holes that needed patching later on. The title track is definitely an essential addition, but less can be said about the other addition “Can’t Stop”, originally a b-side from one of the pre-album EPs. That alone is a little eyebrow-raising, but it also adds to the album’s one noticeable issue: the album has some length and as enchanting as the overall mood is, it actually gets to a little too much of a slog when it retains the same pace, the same tone and the same flow from one track to the next, especially in the latter half. The funny thing is, the songs themselves are good – together they can get a bit heavy but in isolation they all show varying degrees of excellence, apart from the aforementioned "Can’t Stop” which largely just goes nowhere. It lives for its sudden bursts of rock explosion that strike unsuspectedly around its chorus, but they’re not much to get excited about. The almost funeral march like “Coming Second” comes close to another potential tracklist fluffer, but its hypnotic rhythm has a grabbing force that saves its bleak, grim soul from being forgotten.

Regardless, it is a very fine album and each album Elbow releases just makes it more of a stand-out. Elbow’s magic for a long time relied on keeping a certain kind of roughness in balance with their audio perfectionist tendencies, and over the years that roughness has been smoothened away. Fair enough to them – they’re all around happier now and still making excellent music, they don’t need the gruffness. But Asleep in the Back offers it in spades, it exposes Elbow’s tragic heart and doesn’t try to cover or replace it with hi-fi marvels (though the production is, as always for this band, great). It’s perfect for miserybags or dark nights of the soul. Even in a more mentally safe setting it works wonders too because for all its melancholy nature, it can get real pretty at times.

Best enjoyed with something strong to drink along to.

Rating: 8/10