YMMV / Elbow

• Awesome Music: "Grace Under Pressure", "Station Approach", "Lippy Kids", "New York Morning", "One Day Like This", "The Bones of You","Magnificent" and "Grounds for Divorce". Especially with the aid of the BBC Concert Orchestra.
  • "First Steps", being one of the grand songs to use for the 2012 Olympics.
• Funny Moments: Guy Garvey's trumpet fails him near the end of this live performance of "Starlings". He decides to make the best of it.
  • The opening of "Honey Sun". During what seems to be a jam session, somebody accidentally turns on an extremely loud drum machine, causing one other band member to yell "WOAH!" in surprise, followed by the rest of them laughing hysterically, ending with Guy saying "Jesus!". It's probably the greatest moment on the entire album.
• Epic Riff: "Grounds for Divorce".
• Ending Fatigue: What happens to those who don't think "One Day Like This" qualifies for CMOA.
• Nightmare Fuel: Asleep in the Back in almost it's entirety. Considering that it was mainly inspired by post-rock era Talk Talk and Radiohead (possibly OK Computer, given it's similarly sinister sound), it isn't hard to see why Elbow's first album was so eerie and often startling in comparison to every following album.
  • "Little Beast" is, indeed, a little beast. Just listen to it.
  • "Powder Blue" abruptly ends with the sound of shattering glass. Even if you've listened to the song before, it can still be quite a startle.
    • The song itself is more of a Tear Jerker, though of a very bitter and averting kind.
  • "Bitten By the Tailfly". What the hell kind of drugs were they on when they recorded this?
  • The Title Track has some swirling organs that make for a decievingly beautiful song that still manages to make the listener feel a sense of discomfort, on top of lyrics talking about being crushed and smothered.
  • "Newborn". Holy hell, talk about seven minutes of pure chaos. If the song opening with such a lyric as "I'll be the corpse in your bathtub: useless..." (eventually followed by the arguably even worse "You'll spend the end of your days gently smiling like a newborn") wasn't bad enough, the floaty first three minutes of the song transition into an incredible build-up with drums and organs that increasingly become louder and more disorienting; it's almost like pulling on a rubber band and waiting for it to snap. Or, in this case, explode; the song ends with two minutes of Guy Garvey yelling and wailing against an almost shoegaze-esque explosion of guitars and drums, which abruptly shuts itself off with an ear-piercing feedback noise, almost like waking up in a cold sweat from a terrible nightmare.
  • "Don't Mix Your Drinks" follows shortly after, revolving around a quietly menacing acoustic guitar lick while Garvey whispers deeply into the microphone about how mixing your drinks will kill you one day. It's almost like a chant. There's also some distant, high-pitched keyboard noises that come in shortly before the second verse.
    • Those scratchy, tremolo-heavy feedback noises that sound like cars screeching and crashing don't help much either. Eek.
  • "Can't Stop" is a very obsessive-sounding piece of work that starts out with a deep, rumbling bass riff against an aggressive beat. From then on, the song builds itself up to another boom of distortion and feedback as Garvey desperately screams "Pull us back toGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETHER!". After the second time this happens, this song just dies.
  • "Scattered Black & Whites" ends the album with a complete inversion of this. Though some of the lyrics have been speculated to discuss PTSD and growing old (Garvey said it was about his childhood, with the titular "scattered black and whites" referring to old photographs he'd lay out on the floor as a child), the song is otherwise very calming and peaceful in nature, almost giving off a sense of hopefulness ("I come back here from time to time, I shelter here some days"), though that's probably also why it's the only song from the album that the band still performs live.
• Tear Jerker: "Some Riot" and "Friend of Ours" can evoke this reaction, especially if you know the backstory behind The Seldom Seen Kid.
  • "The River" from Build a Rocket Boys! might be an in-universe example of this ("He openly wept as he listened to me").
    • No mention of 'The Night Will Always Win'?
  • Also, "Lippy Kids" is deeply beautiful.
  • "One Day Like This", despite the romantic and generally positive vibe, is actually kind of melancholy when you consider it. Think how depressing the narrator's life must be if he's down to asking the universe for just one good day a year.
    • On the other hand, it could be interpreted as him saying that the day was so brilliant that even if every other day that year was terrible, he'd still be positive and uplifted regardless.
  • No mention for the truly magnificent, er "Magnificent"? Ok, it creates happy tears, but there will be gallons of them!

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