Music Under Fire

Its great to finally come across some news that Elbow's release of "Grounds For Divorce" is on the airwaves to preface their upcoming album The Seldom Seen Kid, due out on March 17th on Fiction Records. But with such a fantastic single as GFD, Guy Garvey is not as happy as one would think. In fact, he's livid with iTunes among other things.

Ultimately, iTunes is a device for selling hardware, MP3-playing hardware, so they should give the artists the freedom to lock their records if they want and it's something that I'm personally gonna see if I can make happen because it's fucking important.

- Guy Garvey

I agree to a point with Garvey - iTunes and other music downloading programs have limited bands such as Elbow to letting fans only listen to what they want. This is the main purpose of music, but when you look at an album as art, you need every piece to show the band in that time of their careers. Every song is chosen for a reason, whether you think its crap or not, it belongs there.

But the single song is important as it is the gateway to lead to other songs by that artist and it ultimately opens the door to a new listener. Afterall, not everyone enjoys sitting down and listening to an album straight through. Sure, selective buying will affect some of the band's revenue to a certain extent, but let's be real. If you love the artist, you're going to buy the album/t-shirt/concert tickets to support them, so in the end it really doesn't matter now, does it?

All anger aside, its been such a long time since I've listened to Elbow - my favorite tracks of theirs are "Not A Job", second "Fugitive Motel" and third "Ribcage". Perhaps I got into Elbow more than most. They haven't had much to show for over the past few years, their last full-length release was Leaders of the Free World in 2005 and I haven't heard much from them since.

Elbow released their Grounds For Divorce - Single on iTunes UK on March 9th. You can download it here. You can also stream it by clicking around on Elbow's Official Site. "Grounds For Divorce" truly shows much progression for Elbows and will be worth looking into, even if this is your first Elbows experience.

MP3: Elbow - Grounds For Divorce (radio rip)

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