[5] It is said to be influenced by Garvey's childhood, as he moved back to the area he grew up in before the album was recorded, and is aimed to appease both their traditional fanbase and those who took a shine to the arena anthems of The Seldom Seen Kid.

[7] The agenda, both thematically and musically, was set by "Jesus Is a Rochdale Girl", a minimalist, Eno-esque track based on Garvey's earlier poem he wrote about his first love.

A couple of times, when struggling with lyrics, he made trips to Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Wiltshire to "share thoughts" with its owner.

[7] "Lippy Kids", according to Q, is a key song: it was written in defence of the British teenager, victim to, as Garvey put it, "the anti-hoody shit that goes on in the media, the thought that if you hang around on a street corner you're a criminal."

Speaking of the overall sound and its apparent lack of radio-friendliness, Garvey commented: "We could write deliberate radio hits until the cows come home, but I think you can hear it really obviously when a band has done that."

So many real musicians under one roof, we were very flattered that they agreed to work with us.Halle Youth Choir (which once has played with the band in 2009) features on six of the tracks, most noticeably, "With Love" and "Open Arms".

[11] According to The Daily Telegraph's Helen Brown, Guy Garvey, very much in the vein of artist LS Lowry, "make(s) something moving and original from the experience of the man on the street", drawing "poignant, minimalist sketches of urban life that seem to be observed with a big yearning heart from a remote distance".

NME's John Doran, insisting that its 'artistic bravery' that places Elbow "in a different league to other purveyors of emotional atmospheric rock", compares the album favourably to Coldplay's Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, noting that the group is "rooted in the sublimely specific and the gloriously mundane" with Guy Garvey here cementing his position of "the laureate of the everyday".

[18] "If you've ever been chucked, realised that you miss your parents, or thought that you don't see enough of your mates, then he has written a song that hits the heart of the matter with frightening resonance", writes the reviewer.

[18] Not exactly impressed by the track "Lippy Kids" ("which sees him lamenting the shortness of childhood in a manner that threatens to become Hovis ad-esque"), the critic points to "Jesus Is a Rochdale Girl" as a "sublime counterpoint to this", calling it "a beautifully vivid recollection of moving in with someone for the first time."

"[18] On the other hand, Alexis Petridis of The Guardian pinpoints "Lippy Kids" as "the album's emotional centre", calling it "a gorgeous meditation on adolescence that recognises both the gauche awfulness of it all [...] and the fact that you may never feel quite as rawly alive again.