After a 25-year career that began with a Mercury Prize shortlisting and a Brit Award nod for best new band, and continued with Mercury and Brit wins (not to mention a couple of Ivor Novellos, an NME and various other accolades), composing the theme for the BBC’s 2012 Olympic coverage and generally becoming one of the U.K.’s most beloved rock bands, it might seem logical to assume that Elbow is due for a stretch of laurel resting. Nothing could be further from the truth; the group’s last album, 2014’s stunning The Take Off And Landing Of Everything, deservedly became the band’s first U.K. number one when it debuted. Coming into Elbow’s seventh studio album, paradise rumbled slightly when Richard Jupp opted out of the band, marking the first lineup change in the group’s history. Soldiering on with session drummer Alex Reeves, the remaining foursome produced Little Fictions, quite possibly the pinnacle of its storied catalog. Frontman Guy Garvey shows that he and the band have a sense of perspective about it all when he intones “What does it prove if you die for a tune?/It’s really all disco” on the psychedelically majestic “All Disco,” a laser beam among Little Fictions’ highlights. The album’s first single, “Magnificent (She Says),” begins as a quietly propulsive pop song but swells to near epic proportions with the help of the Hallé Orchestra; “Trust The Sun” finds the band gliding along on a percolating jazz riff that suggests a marriage of late-period Police and the hushed power of Talk Talk in its prime, and “K2” pulses with a gorgeous Tropicália rhythm. Elbow’s greatest gifts have always been the ability to create a dynamic and fluid atmosphere applied to songs that are simultaneously expansive and intimate, and Little Fictions may be the best example of the band’s talents in action.
—Brian Baker
