Elba - Elba Review

I can't stress enough, the importance of arithmetic.

Elba - Elba (2011) – 4.8 / 10.0

Music does not equal math, well not in a literal sense. I’m sure there are all kinds of algorithmic patterns and sequences involved that some pea-brained PhD could write voluminous tomes on the numeric value of each note, chord, and beat of a given song, but the fact of the matter is providing a song or an album with a numerary value is kind of silly, if not slightly insane. This becomes even more problematic when there is a song or two on a middling album like Elba, that defy the convenient conventionality of the rest and, frankly, kick ass. Think of them as statistical outliers. This sums up Elba, and it makes assigning the album a score, proper, kinda difficult, insanity aside.

Elba (the band) are three albums deep into their career, crafting tunes that straddle the fence separating indie rock from indie pop. The Seattleites bring to mind Death Cab’s confessional fancy-boy theatrics, Creeper Lagoon’s off-kilter emotionalism, and occasional traces of Replacements-like raw vitality, albeit of the disappointingly non alcohol soaked variety, making the album, I suppose, more “rock and roll hissy fit” (please feel free to emphasize the ‘D’) than a beer fueled rock ‘n’ roll fantasy. While I am sure the band imbibes the occasional PBR tallboy, Elba (the record) suffers from an overall listlessness and flaccidity that can be difficult to overcome. Most of the songs plod along at the same slightly-slower-than-mid-tempo pace, wistfully free of solid choruses that might give the tunes a fighting chance of being more interesting or distinguishable, one to the next.

But back to that math lesson. So, there are two standout songs on Elba, one good, and one downright great. I mean really, really great, like I will listen to this A LOT, like, “one of the best tracks I have heard this year” great. Let me get the good song, ‘False Spring’ out of the way first. The track blends The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s florid, half-serious, snarky tweemo self loathing (talking their first record here), with some seriously bludgeoning bass lines, that has stolen most of the oomph that is missing from the rest of the record, sans: the aforementioned great song, ‘Lock Your Doors’, an upbeat, pop-centric mini-masterpiece. ‘Lock…’ speeds up the meter only a mere 12%, give or take, from album mean, and explodes propulsively, like a less smarmy, heartfelt Strokes or a not so verbose Voxtrot (before they got bad, anyway). Essential listening. I assure you that the listed score for Elba was arrived at after hours of exhaustive calculation, arrived at by computing the statistically significant differential values of the ‘meh’ songs from the rad ones. So I started with the coefficient of…. oh. Look at the time. Well, I will explain it all next time, I promise.