it's looking like a beautiful day

Here's the difference between finance professionals and music lovers: if you're a finance professional, you divide the year up into quarters, and April, rather than being the fourth month of the year, is the first month of Q2 2008; whereas if you're a music lover, you wonder what the hell took 2008 so long to finally give you some really great music.

I'm speaking, of course, of M83's new record, Saturdays = Youth. It's a record that makes me glad I lived through its target era, even if the glance backwards only works as well as it does because of a smarmy, gritty, thoroughly po-po-mo reverence for the way we were. But that topic has been covered and then covered some more.

Not to waste a post, though, I'm also talking about the newest Elbow release, The Seldom Seen Kid. Somewhere along the way, Elbow quietly became reliable. The first record was good, but if you paid attention you noticed out of the corner of your ear that each record that followed was better than the last. The trend continues here. I used to describe them as a stopping off point between Coldplay and Radiohead, but they've outgrown that simplification rather well. The production on their records tends to reach towards opulent (especially after cast of thousands which seemed to have been knocked into a vat of Polyphonic Spree and then hurriedly fished out just before it shipped), but they always manage to keep at least seven or eight toes firmly on the asphalt. What's new here is that someone slipped happy pills into their tea. The result is lucious and beautiful. The band is now embracing its ability to uplift rather than simply flirting with it as they've done in the past. Not that it's all treacly wine and roses; a dark playfulness still balances things out, as in lyrics "I have an audience with the Pope/And I'm saving the world at eight/But if she says she needs me, she says she needs me/Everybody's gonna have to wait" or "I've been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce", and the band finds plenty of dark corners in which to hide. In the end, though, it's a record that should make a receptive listener glad to be living through this time, right now, twenty years before the benefit of nostalgia.

Elbow - An Audience With The Pope
Elbow - Weather To Fly