MUSIC REVIEW: ELBOW - LIVE AT THE GREEK THEATER

A Meaningful Evening of Music in Los Angeles Warms Hearts

By: Josh Moorhead

October 2, 2011

(Sunday, October 1, 2011 in Los Angeles, CA) You have seen Elbow. You have heard Elbow. Every day. In your damndest darks, in your brightest days, Elbow has been there. Articles demand words, but what best describes Elbow perhaps - and ironically, since they're a band and all - is what exists in humanity at its most silenced, centered. Some kind of sublime realization that can be mined from even heartbreak, anger, or preferably the peace and joys of life. Call it truth.

These are earnest words, and Elbow can be an earnest band, but it's a sad society that sighs annoyed at the earnest at their best: honest, genuine. If there are words for Elbow, those would be two. There will be more.

Elbow is a band. Elbow is a band comprised of good blokes and mates that have been playing out of Manchester since 1990 but have rarely been given space on the airwaves, bandwidths, or mp3 storage of American shores. After picking up a prestigious Mercury Award in the UK in 2008 for their last album The Seldom Seen Kid, Elbow came bending to the States, and now, with their present release, Build A Rocket Boys! Elbow has returned with all the enthusiasm suggested by that exclamation point.

What will not be seen at an Elbow show is rockets. No pyrotechnics. No laser lights. But that refrain from the song "Lippy Kids" could not be more emphatic. It's an IMAX 3D world out there. A Lady Gaga funhouse of warped mirrors and garbled sounds, and walls of sensation and stimulus. When Elbow sings about rockets, they're not referencing the thunderous violence of a shuttle leaving Florida; they're reaching that place in a person's soul that said, staring in the dark sky for hundreds of years, "Let's go there." Elbow's music is not the incendiary burst of life's distractions and exploding entertainments (the same thing?) - it's the last ember in your burning heart. The one that keeps you fireside when the cold starts biting in October.

Elbow is warmth. Like an old friend. Like a new one that doesn't speak in bulls***. Elbow is a sweater. Elbow is a challenge, to face our hearts. Elbow's music is alternative rock, if the dying record store made someone say so, but it's also the argument that some music, like all art, is capable, is timeless. There's not much to say 2011, 2003, 1987, or 1896 in Elbow's records - there's just a lot to be said for the human experience, long before and after the record store; long before and after records, there's truth. Elbow's "sound" is that of love and resilience.

In Los Angeles's Greek Theater, they gave it their all to win over a crowd up in the woods that's all too used to running into actors at restaurants and is too easily distracted by all things shiny - no easy task when the most noticeable dressing on the stage is a fan. A steel, sitting-there-on-the-floor fan. No dancers. No Broadway set-dressing. No Star Wars. But truth is lurking... so win they did.

What's realized, when listening to Elbow up there in Hollywood's great big log cabin, is that they're onto - in the singing along, in the dancing, in the reaching - what separates man from the deer and the trees in Griffith Park and pushes us to the stars. Motown, yes. Motown, sure. Motown I know...but this is soul music. Build a rocket boys, indeed.  Elbow wears on its sleeve and downs with a smile and a drink all that stuff, all that dark matter of the sky's expanse and the human heart's tricky depths that science crumbles at for explanation but whose building particles we all know: truth.

Truth we sit on and ride rudimentary-like worn bus seats to tired jobs and repeated process and totally undersell for what it's worth, which is everything, after all. Truth like "I love you." At which the reader winces, at which the critic cripes for being manipulative, at which the girl at whom it's directed deflects too casually on grounds of it being heavy or uncalled for. But if we don't own up to our souls, why did we pay 40 bucks to be in the park? To sing? Why not just be the deer?

Elbow's words are better than this writer's. Lead singer Guy Garvey's stage presence is maybe the only like it that I've ever seen. The man is not a rock star, and he's not a showman, per se. No one comes out to lay a cape on him at the end of the night as he sweats and pleads on his knees. But he talks to that crowd with a forthrightness, a casual charm, like a man in conversation with the individual. He's the best guy at the bar, but his voice has the soft reverberation of a hymn. There's something Sting there, maybe a slice of Bono, maybe James Bond - maybe the British accent is enough to convince and intrigue the American ear... but that Euro flavor is the least of what Elbow has to offer, even as the voice calms, challenges, inspires.

Guy talks to the crowd not in an arena, but in a pub. About heartbreak, and friends, and life's journey, and how New York harmonized better than us. And he chuckles. For the first time, a lead singer goes for a soaring high note, lights blaring up behind him, chokes off the shot of booze he just took to celebrate the band's anniversary with his boys, and laughs, stops, gives it another go. The crowd does not boo. The crowd is not disappointed. Somehow, in under two hours of time together, Elbow is not the monkey you paid to see dance, impersonal and unknown - they're the chums you chuckle with when gravitas doesn't go quite as planned, but all is forgiven because you know them, you know the intent, you're overcome with the genuineness and sincerity of it all.

Guy grumbles after a particularly emotional salvo in the last number about some confetti from the night before trickling down from the rafters - a reminder that he and the rest of Elbow don't have the production value of what he assumes was "Muse" - but the charm and moment itself serves as reminder to the audience that Elbow doesn't need confetti, and that's it - they're won. Things shiny forgotten in their shallow plastic, traded for all that burning, churning of reached hands. Elbow is the music of reaching.

Some entertainments aim to be emotional. Elbow is not the soundtrack for Lifetime, but the music for a lifetime. Some songs have a bluesy edge, like "Grounds for Divorce," where the angry heat of the bayou can almost be felt raising on guitar chords that are more Queens of the Stone Age than church; others soar on brass and epiphany, like on "Starlings." The lyrics tumble in honest poems like "Starlings's" beautiful "You're the only thing in every room you're ever in / I'm stubborn, selfish and too old," and the heart breaks with this man, most of his songs inspired by a time living with a girl who became the inspiration and breaking of his heart, only to be told then in "Open Arms" "We've got open arms for broken hearts / Like yours, my boy, come home again," and the crowd chants, and the heart heals. These are the songs of love and resilience, of reaching. Not the fuel that launches the rocket, but the desire that imagines such a cockamamie idere and builds the damn thing. Oh, it's all very grandiose and sweeping, isn't it? But without the rocket, what have we accomplished? Without love, what have we done? Without friends, how have we lived? Without heartbreak, Elbow is not on stage convincing a bunch of jaded Americans that it all, Elbow included, is well worth it.

Elbow -- in all that earnestness, in all that melodious orchestration and leveling with the crowd and clearing of throats and winking pauses for a drink -- isn't afraid to admit, in their music and their show, what we're all too afraid to say sometimes, stupid as it is, in the shows we put on: we're not the deer.

A very worthy addition: The Denver-based DeVotchKa opened - a kind of gypsy foursome where it's not strange and is welcome to come across a tuba, any woodwind, and a theremin is natural. Lead singer Nick Urata was described by someone in the crowd by saying, "I didn't know George Clooney could sing." So easy on the eyes but a natural on the instruments, he manipulates for an adventuresome sound that would fit in anything from Leone's Westerns to whatever one imagines Terry Gilliam might whistle while doing dishes in his flat. There's imagination and intrigue in it, and a foot-clomping showmanship that's all orchestrated by Urata as he swigs wine - the hoedown in the hull of the Titanic. But nothing ever sinks. And on Saturday evening in a brisk Greek Theater October night, everything only rose.

Elbow & DeVotchKa: please feel welcome to come back anytime. Anytime.

All photos by: Lauren Elfman