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Asleep in the Back [Bonus Track]

by Elbow

• Buy it at Amazon.com

Asleep in the Back, Elbow's frighteningly competent debut album, presents 11 tracks of rain-sodden misery blown up into the breed of gracefully elegiac fatalism that once formed the essence of, say, Joy Division. Elbow's foggy psychedelic swirl and sewer-deep dub bass lines might recall the prog-rock indulgences of Radiohead, but their grievances are unmistakably aired from the far end of a welfare line. "Any Day Now" veritably fidgets with small-town frustration, with lead singer Guy Garvey (a man with the voice of an angel and the face of a brickie) repeatedly hissing a mantra of desperation: "Any day now / How's about getting out of this place / Anyways?" Should we take it as a given that Elbow will break out of this rut of depression and despair? Asleep in the Back is good enough to suggest so, while also suggesting that fate can be awfully cruel. --Louis Pattison