Bandnames are important. The best ones are good indicators of where a band is coming from and what they're trying to achieve. Or at the very least, they sound good and work with the band's sound. Unfortunately, not all bands can seem to find that one moniker that's perfect for them, and a lot of them end up settling for some word that was lying around not being used for much else.

Take Elbow, for instance. That's a bleeding awful name for a band. It doesn't even lend itself to much of a backstory. What do you say to the interviewer when he asks how you chose your name? "Oh, well, we always wanted to name the band for the bony joint where the upper arm meets the forearm." Even the various idioms the word appears in-- elbow room, elbow grease-- can't help it out.

And then there's the questions it raises. What does this band called Elbow sound like? What made them call themselves Elbow? Are they good? They don't sound very cool. Well, friends, it's my good fortune to report to you that the band's music is a lot better than their name.

The English quintet open their debut at a medium tempo with "Any Day Now," a song that immediately highlights a few of their strengths, and also hints at a few of their weaknesses. Drummer Jupp (who apparently has just the one name) lays down a slightly fractured, snare-heavy beat accompanied by a modicum of subtle programming and Pete Turner's dub-influenced bass. Lead vocalist Guy Garvey seems to have his voice on loan from Peter Gabriel, though he keeps his delivery hushed and rather low-key. The entire band harmonizes impressively with him on the choruses, making for a dense texture, especially when combined with Craig Potter's organ lines.

Garvey's Gabriel resemblance gradually melts away as the rest of the album unfolds, though he occasionally returns to it when he goes for the big held notes that punctuate the climaxes of songs like "Can't Stop" and the excellent closer "Scattered Black and Whites." "Red" also retains some of Gabriel's influence, with its deceptively complex drum and percussion parts and heaving cello. Garvey's refrain of "this can't go on" is one of the album's best melodic moments. As the song's mix dismantles itself at the conclusion, the main elements exit first, leaving behind a heavily delayed and tremoloed guitar part that you hardly even noticed was there during the song.

Mark Potter dumps delay-drenched guitars all over a creeping programmed drumbeat on "Little Beast," which finds Garvey sitting a little further from the front of the mix, instead subsumed by the atmospheric music created by his bandmates. It takes a bit too long to get to the next song, though, and the track isn't really interesting enough to warrant all of its four minutes. By the time "Powder Blue" finally does roll around, Asleep in the Back's biggest flaw starts to come into focus.

The song is actually pretty good taken on its own, with Garvey hitting a good falsetto on the refrain and the boys providing him with some fine backing vocals, but the entire album falls within a very narrow, and very slow tempo range. "Powder Blue" works well in that range, with its floating piano ostinatos and light spattering of sax, but these guys really need a fast song to insert somewhere in the running order for the sake of diversity.

The closest they come is "Bitten by the Tailfly," another strong track. It's not exactly fast, but its feel is considerably different from what surrounds it. Mark Potter's guitar kicks up actual dust for the first time on the album, and the faux-tribal beats and curiously tense verses lend the song a sort of neurotic pulse that draws you in. The dynamic shifts between the verses and Potter's deafening guitar interjections are almost enough to keep it interesting on their own, but thankfully, the whole song proves engaging.

The band is always discriminating with their arrangements, occasionally utilizing analog synths to color in the edges of a passage, and using extra musicians to fill in the texture where it's obvious that the band's own instruments wouldn't quite be enough. The best example of this is the woodwind quintet that shows up on the record's title cut. At first, the cor anglais and clarinet enter with long, held notes, almost blending with the organ, but by the song's end, the whole quintet has joined, offering up countermelodies and some needed timbrel variety.

While the band has a very developed sense of texture and sound, though, they rather desperately need to work on changing things up a bit more with regard to the songs themselves. As I said before, the whole album comes in at roughly the same tempo. And though they're able to make a seven-minute epic like "Newborn" interesting all the way through by shifting the texture almost constantly, simply shifting textures a lot doesn't offer the kind of variety I need to sustain me over the course an entire album.

Elbow have managed to craft a skilled and laudable debut. Asleep in the Back finds them starting their recording career (they've been a live unit for almost ten years now) at a level a lot of bands don't even reach on their third or fourth albums. If they manage to harness their strengths and inject just a bit more variety into the mix, I have a feeling a second album from Elbow could really deliver.

-Joe Tangari, February 6th, 2002