Seldom Seen Kid by Elbow

Elbow’s fourth album shouldn’t have happened. Dropped by their label, producing themselves, and four albums into a twenty year career that had only really begun to happen this decade, it came out without much in the way of expectation, but by the time it had shortlisted and won the Mercury Music Prize Elbow had gone up a notch in popularity, a stadium band, who were also seen as national treasures.

Guy Garvey’s down-to-earth Bury persona is part of this, but Garvey has always worn his heart on his sleeve lyrically, and with this album being a tribute to a dead friend, that honesty reached its apex with their fourth album. Always less than content with the short form pop song, their albums are integrated works, which still manage to have the odd radio hit on them – in this case, the song that the BBC chose to soundtrack the Olympics, the euphoric, One Day Like This, possibly the most conventionally structured song of their career.

Yet its Garvey’s world weary vocals, and the ever varied sonic palate that makes this album in particular so resonate with the times. It seems now that Elbow, four albums in, are the honesty and soul of the decade’s British music.

X&Y by Coldplay

A band’s success often takes a certain trajectory. There is the breakthrough album, then the one that takes them to another level and then the next one… for Coldplay, X&Y was the “next one” and it suffers as they often do from expectations. There had no doubt been a massive progression from debut Parachutes to A Rush of Blood to the Head, but X&Y, despite protestations at the time, seems in retrospect to be the difficult one. It has none of the standout tracks that characterised both their predecessors, or rather, those emblematic tracks were too sombre, too mainstream.

It’s a downbeat album, and I’m not sure it was what the world wanted from Coldplay in record number 3, though the world as ever gave them the benefit of the doubt. It would probably take Viva La Vida, with its renewed optimism, to stop them going into a downward spiral. There’s the troublesome Talk, a riff looking for a song, and only finding one in a sample of Kraftwerk’s Computer Love. Then there’s there most maudlin and barren ballad, the piano led Fix You. Never a guitar act in the same way that Radiohead are, the acoustic guitars and pianos on this album dominate to a somnabulistic effect.

Deliberately put into 2 sides, X and Y, the latter is the more upbeat – and there are some nice melodies, and some pleasing arrangements, but everything is either tentative or tasteful. Album tracks like What If and The Hardest Part see Chris Martin at his most plaintive, and that’s part of the band’s appeal, yet there’s something distant about the album compared with what they’ve done before.

Opening single Speed of Sound sounded beautiful but overproduced and there was some anger from commentators when it was kept from number one by a novelty record, Crazy Frog’s ringtone based version of Axel F. It was a certain irony that a band trying to cope with being modern was beaten to the top by an effortless modernity.

Yet Speed of Sound is more similar to the previous albums anthems than X&Ys acoustic ballads.

At the end of the day, the album remains a solid piece of work, beautiful in parts, but one-paced, and seeming to lack the definition of their best work. Its sales were still remarkable though – and Coldplay would end the decade having released four multi-million selling records.