Courting the Squall is the debut solo album by the English musician Guy Garvey, who is best known as the lead singer of Elbow.

[1] Writing in Mojo, James McNair said: 'Courting the Squall' finds Garvey and 'his favourite players outside elbow' on superlative, genre-hopping form.

Harder Edges and Belly Of The Whale mine a kind of wiry, colliery funk and Electricity, a perfectly weighted duet with Jolie Holland, soothes and transports like some between the wars jazz standard.

[2] The Independent said: At the album’s heart, however, are the sketched impressions of quiet emotional turmoil that have become part of Garvey’s stock-in-trade, a personal space bookended here by the ebullient energy so charmingly contained by the plaintive melodica, cycling piano and dulcimer of 'Juggernaut' and the gloom that finds him "missing that moody girl" in 'Harder Edges'.

"I’m sick of ticking boredom, counting down the beating hours,” he notes; “She was capable of kind, but not inclined" – a couplet that carries a whole world of regret.