Elbow looked for a while to be settling into a mellow, beatific serenity. Their last album, 2021’s Flying Dream 1, was a winningly gentle affair, its delicate tracks seemingly competing between themselves to be the most soothingly romantic. You idly wondered if the band were easing into a benign dotage.
This impression was spectacularly misleading. Elbow have always been too itchy and antsy a group to settle for mere prettiness, and their recent album, Audio Vertigo, their fourth to top the UK chart, returned to more challenging musical terrain. No prog rock band worth their salt ever totally abandons their uneven time signatures.
