Elbow Strike The Right Notes Again

1. The Take Off And Landing of Everything is Elbow's first album in 3 years since the solid Build A Rocket Boys! in 2011 and the early signs are it's noticeably better

2. The second single from the new album, 'New York Morning' is classic Elbow, a slow pondering opening leading to tubthumping chorus and finale

3. One of Elbow's strengths since they started out in 2001, has been their focus on not rushing albums out, in order to ensure the quality of the songs, 6 albums in and the formula is still working

4. Keyboard player and the bands mixer / producer, Craig Potter, is a bit mad when it comes to Twitter, when he's not reminding people when bin day is every week, his musings border on the slightly unhinged

5. 2008's The Seldom Seen Kid has by far been the band's best album to date, and while we all spent a summer singing the chorus to 'Grounds For Divorce' and mumbling through the verses, possibly their best single ever was the anthemic 'One Day Like This', here it is with the BBC Orchestra doing the song justice

6. Elbow have consistently named Peter Gabriel as the biggest influence over their music, along with Genesis and Radiohead, they've also covered a Gabriel song, and he covered their track 'Mirrorball', so, best of buds

7. The band are coming to Ireland this summer and play The Marquee in Cork (below) on the 24th of June and The Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin the following night, tickets are still available, at a cool €50...

8. Front-man Guy Garvey is a really nice bloke, so nice, he took 2 minutes to impart some pearls of wisdom for aspiring musicians

9. And so to finish off, we leave you with the first single from The Take Off And Landing Of Everything, 'Fly Boy Blue / Lunette', a proper rousing number we think you'll agree

10. Elbow's new album is almost like a concoction of their previous two albums, but it's a little less barnstorming than we've become accustomed too, a bad thing? Perhaps not, time will tell, having said that, it's hard to find any major faults, so it's a 3.5 / 5 from us