No storm precipitated this Guy Garvey solo outing. His band, the Mercury-winning Elbow, are an outfit who model an alternative version of Mancunian masculinity – stolid, affectionate, grandiloquent. That 25-year relationship hasn’t been swept away by the usual attritional acrimony, he reassures us.
You can hear confirmation in the musical differences that divide Courting the Squall from one of the more experimental Elbow albums: minor detailing rather than schismatic shifts. Elbow fans will find themselves at home on songs such as the title track, a gentle three-legged lullaby in which a kora (the 21-string West African lute) adds to the reassurance Garvey is offering a troubled friend. His voice remains as ever it was – bluff and tender, cross and pensive, wordy or curt as the song requires. In the company of friends and colleagues (but no other Elbows) he just turns the brass – an Elbow fixture – up to 11 every so often; or throws out a wiggy keyboard solo that takes its inspiration from Fela Kuti, as on Angela’s Eyes.
On Electricity, Garvey finally goes full jazz, enlisting his favourite singer, Jolie Holland, to guest. It’s not actually that startling a departure, just a new way of saying: “I am a singer in my 40s; I can do nuanced music for grownups.”
On paper, too, Garvey seems the least startling of the 22 curators of London’s annual Meltdown festival thus far; but he might yet surprise us next year. There are standout songs such as Harder Edges. Here, the rhythm section inaugurates a beat you can only call “jazz-baggy”. The trumpets are given their heads, and you can hear a soupçon of the 70s Bowie so beloved of James “LCD Soundsystem” Murphy. At the climax, Garvey hollers in a strained key, as vocals, brass and beats fail to converge, quite magnificently. It’s a passage worth the admission price alone.
As ever, though, Garvey’s lyrics can be a thing of wonder – or not, often on the same song. On the title track, the eloquent parsimony of a line like “In the hills, it’s an overcoat colder” rubs up against the later image-confusion of someone “hovering worriedly over [their] eggs” while Garvey is “pondering trees”.
You suspect he just wanted to see what he might do solo, rather than planning to do so long-term; trying paragliding, rather than getting a divorce. There’s an irresistible parallel in Garvey’s personal life. The romantic split from his long-term partner that informed Elbow’s The Take Off and Landing of Everything (2014) still resonates; but another love, it seems, has begun. There is still “the dust of self-loathing and unreturned clothing”; but there are also trumpets. At the end of Yesterday, we have the album’s big reveal. “I am reborn,” Garvey declares, throwing those curtains wide, “Cos my girl loves yesterday/ And lives for tomorrow.”
