Elbow's third album is their best yet, a magnificently powerful mediation on lost love and failed relationships. Yet it's not only broken hearts that Guy Garvey can dissect so well, as this title track of the album proves.
Leaders Of The Free World is Garvey's attack on the Neo-Conservatives currently ruling us. It's a dense, heavy song, featuring a relentless rhythm and some incisive lyrics - "I think we dropped the baton like the '60s didn't happened" laments Garvey an incessantly catchy little chorus sticks like superglue in your mind.
Songs bashing George W Bush and Tony Blair are ten-a-penny these days and often come off as cliched and naive. Not here though - a line like "passing the gun from father to feckless son" pretty much sums up the state of the world beautifully. An excellent single, from a band who just get better and better.
