Best Of 2008 (#5)

Now we move on to separate albums with fuller reviews. At number 5, it is:

Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid

The album sounds quite dark and dismal, but it is beyond brilliant. Tracks such as Grounds For Divorce and One Day Like This lift this album to exceptional heights, the former of which is approaching its 100th play in my iTunes.

The opener, Starlings, sounds quiet and then changes to quite loud so fast it makes you jump. It's an odd song, but it does its job as an opening song. The album moves onto The Bones Of You, which was the last single released from the album, and is quite good.

Mirrorball is a slow, six-minute song which is actually quite beautiful when you get down to it. Then comes the furious Grounds For Divorce, whose guitar riff is the best I've ever heard, it's so good they didn't need a chorus, they just stuck the riff in, and it sounds fantastic. The only truly fast song on the album is one of the best songs ever.

Then the album calms down with An Audience With The Pope and Weather To Fly. The first of which is a piano-led song which isn't bad at all, and the second is a bit different, with one person singing lines such as "Are we having the time of our lives?" in the background, while Guy Garvey goes through the lyrics and prompty starts them again halfway through.

Then comes the powerful Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver, whose drum part goes really well with the song, and Guy Garvey's vocals soar on this song. This should have been a single. Then comes the jaunty, upbeat The Fix, which sounds a bit like a folk song, but is quite catchy.

Then we come to the end of the album. Some Riot is a slow, dark song which really gets to you, and then we come to the next brilliant part of the album. The seven-minute epic One Day Like This has been proven to be one of the best songs to be played live. The first three minutes work well when not live, but all of it, especially the end where the line "Throw those curtains wide, one day like this a year would see me right" is just constantly repeated over and over, works brilliantly live. But it's still an absolutely extraordinary song.

I felt that the album should have stopped there. The end, Friend Of Ours, doesn't seem to work after we've already had a song that could close the album perfectly. The song in itself is quite good, however.

This album deserved the Nationwide Mercury Prize, and all of it is fantastic.

SCORE: 9/10