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The Seldom Seen Kid | 
 enlarge | Artist: Elbow
Label: Polydor
Category: Music
List Price: £9.99
Buy Used: £5.14
You Save: £4.85 (49%)
Used (7) from £5.14
Rating:  106 reviews
Sales Rank: 4829
Format: Import
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 001106302
UPC: 602517642522
EAN: 0602517642522
ASIN: B0015I2P0Y
Release Date: April 22, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Ships from the USA, please allow 10-14 days for delivery. Region 1 encoding requires a North American or multi-region DVD player and NTSC compatible TV. Over 2,000,000 satisfied customers worldwide.
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| Tracks:
| • | Starlings | | • | Bones of You | | • | Mirrorball | | • | Grounds for Divorce | | • | Audience with the Pope | | • | Weather to Fly | | • | Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver | | • | Fix | | • | Some Riot | | • | One Day Like This | | • | Friend of Ours |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
There are few things in life quite so liberating as the opening track on an Elbow album--they're like airlocks between the plainness of the outside world and the elaborate melancholic heave-ho that you are likely about to submerge yourself in. Following predecessors "Any Day Now", "Ribcage" and "Station Approach", "Starlings" opens their fourth album The Seldom Seen Kid rising from a bed of tumbling electronic subtlety like a depressed Atari game loading up, adding bare touches of piano, glimpses of ambient guitar, out of body background vocals, an understated pulse and a wisp of strings, before--EXCELSIS!--a fanfare avalanche of horns crashes the gate and elevates things to gasping palatial heights, before Guy Garvey's inimitable gravel tone and wrenchingly poetic reinterpretations of the everyday announce their arrival proper. It's astonishing, by far the most progressive moment on the album and if anything it sets the bar too high. But even when the pace dips, and songs like "Mirrorball" and "Weather to Fly" don't distinguish themselves quite enough, their textural peerlessness remains. This is a beautiful sounding record. Their collaboration with Richard Hawley may be more of a curiosity than a thing of beauty, but the highs, the riffing cross-stitch of "Ground for Divorce", the desolate grandeur of "The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver" and the enlightened string-laden anthem "On a Day Like This" (like their own Sound of Music--only substitute the Alpine peaks for a Manchester high-rise) number amongst the best of their career. --James Berry
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 ulp... May 7, 2008
Richie III (London)
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
...can't seem to get that lump out of my throat. Or stop listening to Weather to Fly... could be a connection there.
My god I love this.
Seen them live four times now and the last time a few weeks ago was the best. They've been together for 18 years so it wouldn't be surprising if they stop making albums, but I really hope they don't - each one just gets better.
This is my favourite album by my favourite band. So there.
Life's big issues by one of the best bands around. February 22, 2008
Mr. D. J. Brindle (Merseyside, UK)
110 out of 117 found this review helpful
Rumoured to be Elbow's last new album in the traditional sense of the word (the band have hinted that future releases may be in the form of EP's / singles only) they return here with what can only be described as a beautiful, masterful, heartbreakingly delicate collection of simply brilliant songs.
It's an album on which Guy Garvey, lead singer and lyricist, seeks to address the big issues of life, love and loss and the resulting collection of songs is perhaps Elbow's finest to date.
"Starlings" starts the album off with aplomb, a hushed harmonised intro of vocals, glockenspiel and piano giving way to a huge burst of horns before Guy Garvey begins his vocal. Garvey has the sort of voice that could sing the entire telephone book to you and you'd still find it deep, and meaningful and melancholically beautiful.
"Bones Of You" with it's flamenco influences, details lyrically that moment whereby you're rushing around a town centre when suddenly you catch a few bars of a song you last hear when you were happy, and somewhere else, and it blasts you back to that time. And back to the love you felt then; "And I'm five years ago/and three thousand miles away". Musically it's quite a commercial and accessible song, like a few on the album. And there's a bitter lyrical under taste in the fact that it becomes apparent that the singer of the song has been lying to himself to a greater or lesser extent, all these years. Brilliant stuff.
Mirrorball is a typically stunning and beautiful Elbow ballad; "Dawn gives me a shadow I know to be taller. All down to you. Everything has changed." over acoustic drums and semi-whispered, right in your ear and head vocals. Gorgeous strings too. Stirring and yet romantic.
Grounds For Divorce, a track many of you have probably heard by now, or at the least seen the country and western tinged video, is based around a stinging guitar riff, part Bloc Party part Led Zep, and a darkly humorous lyric about spending far too much time in a spit and sawdust underground bar; "I've been working on a cocktail / Called grounds for divorce"
With "Audience With The Pope" Garvey tackles religion in a song that he's dubbed "A Bond theme if Bond was from Bury and a recovering Catholic.". It even has the requisite Bond-theme-esque guitar solo.
Next track "Weather To Fly" is beautiful and the sort of track Snow Patrol would record if they could actually write and sing songs that were anything deeper than shallow. It starts with a heartbreaking falsetto sub-vocal and a bass line that sounds distinctly "Chasing Cars" before the beautiful lyrics spin out over the gentle beats;
Pounding the streets where my fathers feet still
Ring from the walls,
we'd sing in the doorways,
or bicker and row
Just figuring how we were wired inside
Perfect weather to fly.
Brilliant.
Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver is a stunningly intelligent track in which the misery of someone else's life is played out through all of us. Sounds complicated - it's actually brilliant. It's a heartfelt song, the type which Elbow do best, an industrial percussive line underpinning a swooning vocal and a string laden melody.
Richard Hawley duets with Garvey on next track "Fix", a chirpy, atmospheric, after last orders little number which lyrically deals with a pair of chancers making plans for their ill gotten gains.
Some Riot sounds like a mournful plea to a long lost friend, possibly "The Seldom Seen Kid" himself (Bryan Glancy, a friend of the bands who sadly died in 2007). "I think when he's drinking / he's drowning some kind of riot / what is my friend trying to hide / cos it's breaking my heart / it's breaking my heart".
"One Day Less" sounds like the natural successor to "Any Day Now", whether the main character's luck has changed. Or has it? The strings soar, the drums beat endlessly and Garvey swoons about seeing the light, and being in love.
"Friend Of Ours" is definitely a tribute to the bands lost friend Bryan Glancy, the seldom seen kid. It's beautiful, not at all sugary, and genuinely touching and moving. A fitting album closer if there ever was one. If Garvey's "Love you mate....." doesn't move you then you must have a heart of stone, surely.
This is a fantastic album, sure to please Elbow fans and I think equally sure to attract hoardes of new fans too. If you like your music delicate yet powerful, swooning yet direct and happy yet sad - this is most certainly the album, and the band, for you.
God bless you kid March 24, 2008
russell clarke (halifax, west yorks)
16 out of 18 found this review helpful
Slowly , inexorably ,Elbow have become the BIG band we can rely on. More so than Radiohead (Whose admirably non-commercial bent makes them hard to warm to musically sometimes) more so than R.E.M. who have become rather derivative , and certainly more so than pompous blowhards like Coldplay and U2 . Their debut "Asleep In The Back " still sounds magnificent and while for me "Leaders Of The Free World" didn't quite justify the hype it is still an album with wondrous moments. "The Seldom Seen Kid" therefore has been as hotly anticipated as the next Paris Hilton home video . A lot of pressure for the band then ...
Keyboard player Craig Potter has taken over production duties and while he's not installed any major changes in the band's sound, there's a sparkle and variety about the album that renders it instantaneously appealing. As is usual with Elbow, significant subjects dominate. Several members of the band have recently become fathers, and the album is dedicated to their close friend Bryan Glancy, a Mancunian singer/songwriter who died in 2006. Of course, there's also the usual Guy Garvey ruminations on love, bereavement and relationships, written with his earthy eloquence and wit.
The usual guitars , keyboards and drums are embellished by strings ,brass and what is credited as "The Elbow choir". The sound is expansive and hefty , several songs alternate between quiet/loud moments and Garvey ,s slightly gravely tones are in fine fettle .He can do the sensitive stuff ....well sensitively but when some vocal thrust is needed he is never found short of horsepower.
Take the exceptional "The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver" where the aching cavernous strings see Garvey lament perceptively till at the swelling orchestration he howls with consummate empathy .That's just one of several outstanding songs on this album. "Starlings " has warbling electronics and languorous vocal backing punctuated by truly startling ruptures of brass and great lines like "I'm asking you to back a horse that's good for glue". "The Bones Of You " sets off kilter percussion to thrumming guitar notes and morphs from lovely melody to reverberating dissension like a butterfly turning into an iron vampire bat.
The pretty acoustic "MirrorBall" lends itself to a glistening orchestral in contrast to the grinding industrial tones of "Grounds For Divorce" which still has a memorable hummed verse line. It's that ability to match the incongruous to purring melodies that makes a band like Elbow so special. "An Audience For The Pope" sounds like a soundtrack with espalier keyboards and a melody as smooth as a racing snake. "Weather To Fly" is a truly unparalleled ballad with multi tracked vocals where Garvey is asking "Are we having the time of our life's?" while sounding utterly forlorn .
Yet in the midst of all this touching splendour comes the duet with Richard Hawley "The Fix" a playful character piece about a pair of scammers with slightly arch harmonies , fairground organ and fifties guitar . "Some Riot" is a solemn incremental ballad with trembling chords and this segues into "One Day Like This" which has dreamy slightly oriental strings which suddenly jar like a stubbed toe then turn all dreamy again as Garvey cry's "Holy cow I love your eyes". The Elbow come in for the last third in a redolent of "Grace Under Pressure" from their last album ."Friends Of Ours" is the closing elegy to Glancy with crystal piano notes, dew heavy guitar and another exquisite string arrangement. Hidden extra "Were Away" is brief and like a bar lounge number with the lights dimmed low and tumbler filled with scotch on the rocks on top of the piano.
The Seldom Seen Kid is an exceptional album , full of pathos , compassion, vulnerability and yet also brimming with strength and self deprecating wit. It does that tremendously difficult thing of matching genuine sonic and musical innovation with a sterling ear for a rousing tune. Okay it won't blow your windows out with astounding clinical soniferous experimentation which is what some people will criticise it for no doubt. While it's on though the world will go away and you feel truly alive and full of rampant possibilities. That's what great music does. That's what Elbow can do better than most .On this album they do it a hell of a lot. Holy cow I love this album .
Listen to this every day March 31, 2008
JT (Egham, Surrey United Kingdom)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Having rated Leaders of the Free World amongst my 5 favourite albums of all time, I was looking forward to receiving The Seldom Seen Kid.
After several listens, I just can't hear enough of Seldom Seen Kid. The songs are hauntingly sung, so well crafted they should be used to teach songsmiths how to write and the production mix means that every small nuance of the vocals and instruments join in perfect harmony to create a richness that is sadly lacking in many othr band's music.
This is an album for anyone who has experienced joy, suffered loss, felt love or loss in their life. Get out there and buy it. You won't be disappointed (but if you are, you've lost your soul!).
Don't mention Coldplay if you know what's good for you March 17, 2008
Big Jim (London, UK)
19 out of 22 found this review helpful
There are more in depth reviews below so I'll keep this short.
Suffice to say that it annoys me greatly that Elbow are lumped in with bands such as Coldplay and Keane. Now these are not bad bands, I just find them dull and listless. (my opinion) But if you DO like these bands, then you will probably enjoy this album - Elbow's best yet by the way. However be prepared to find music which is more uplifting, soulful, exciting (yes!) varied, rewarding and quite frankly more beautiful than you are perhaps used to.
I don't mean to patronise, but in this case the critics are right, Elbow are the beez neez in this niche (and in most other niches as well) so music fans of the world take note...
BUY THIS ALBUM - YOU WILL NOT BE DISSAPOINTED!
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