Build a Rocket Boys!

Faced with a success like Mercury Prize-winner The Seldom Seen Kid some acts would be incapable of resisting a retread. Not Elbow. Sonically ambitious but thematically familiar, Build a Rocket Boys! finds new textures within the band’s established brand of festival-ready melancholia, most notably with “Open Arms”—which transfers the surging romanticism of “One Day Like This” to the “finger rolls and folding chairs” of a tear-soaked family homecoming.