Elbow - Giants of All Sizes review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

The Guardian 80

(Polydor)
It’s a dislocated Elbow that you get on this proggy, restless record – but their sense of empathy is still strong

Halfway through the eighth Elbow album comes a lyric that’s almost impossible not to home in on. “Who am I?” sings Guy Garvey on White Noise White Heat, a song that recounts the singer’s despairing reaction to the “unspeakable crime” of the Grenfell Tower fire. “Some blarney Mantovani with a lullaby when the sky’s falling in.”

It sounds like a snarky critic’s dissection of the music that propelled Elbow to mainstream fame. Ever since their 2008 single One Day Like This became not just a hit, but an omnipresent part of British life – there was a lengthy period when no sporting achievement or victory in a TV talent show was allowed to be televised without it blaring buoyantly on the soundtrack – Elbow have enjoyed a decade as Britain’s leading purveyors of ballad-paced, bruised-but-warm northern optimism. In fairness, that’s rather a reductive view of their subsequent output, but equally, no Elbow album since has been allowed to pass without at least one song that fitted the bill: string-laden, stately paced, its central message essentially “come ’ere, you daft bugger, give us a hug”.