Just listening to this terrific new effort by Elbow they strike you as a band who've been around for a lot longer than they have. Old souls that have been making music for ages - they're like Gomez in that respect. They've got a wizened, world-weary quality about them that goes beyond their resemblance to Peter Gabriel and though Leaders of the Free World represents a bit of a departure from their previous musical M.O., it's their maturity that is their chief defining characteristic. On this their third since 2002, Elbow has introduced a welcome focus both in terms of song structure and melodic pointedness, and in my opinion this shift, however slight, has righted a ship whose faulty navigational equipment caused them to stray off course, just enough to disconcert and even frustrate on occasion. To some, their murkier meandering was the beauty of the beast, but after hearing what they can do by adding just a measure of discipline, I'm sold on this liberating new order that has come to their free world.

Leaders of the Free World finds them working within song-structure that much more often leads to rich choruses full of the kind of pay dirt that I knew they were capable of all along. Their resemblance to Peter Gabriel still holds in a more general sense but a careful study of singer Guy Garvey reveals a much closer resemblance to the vocal timbre of Catherine Wheel front man Rob Dickinson. Regardless how noticeable one finds this departure from the wandering opoid torpor, toward more radio-friendly territory, it will probably engender a good bit of sell-out finger-pointing, but I won't be joining that misguided lot. I can't deny that both Asleep in Back and Cast of Thousands were fascinating records with a seductive ethereal melancholia as unique in their own way as Gomez is in theirs. But for those who believed their first two albums suffered slightly for their languid aimlessness, the addition of a compass to the mix is a happy development - though there will be plenty who consider the change to be more akin to GPS.

Just to get a feel for what kind of critical fallout Leaders of the Free World may be causing, I checked in with one of the major internet outfits and sure enough they were pitching a fuss about it - going so far as to allege that Elbow had moved away from trying to sound like Radiohead and were now in full Travis midlife-crisis mode. Adding that they'd now vindicated the fools who had once likened them to Coldplay. How do you slip that kind of preposterous liable past an editor? This is the first time that I've actually quoted one of these gentleman and to be honest I rarely frequent their sites. The majority of the reviews I've read strike me as a lot of self-aggrandizing pretense, where you're likely to find out more about the vast vocabulary of the critic than anything you might have wished to learn about the album in question.

This is a blanket indictment that I'm not terribly comfortable making, because, the fact of the pop-matter, is that I generally steer clear of these forks in the cyber-road. In this case however, the opinion presented is beyond ridiculous. The changes the band has made on this striking new release represent nothing more than a slight turn in the direction of structural cohesiveness and in no way have they lost any part of their soul in the translation. If you're looking for a band to point to that Elbow's shift toward structural focus has brought about, forget about Travis or Coldplay and think James. I hate to come off sounding like those who I've just criticized, but this is a far more correct opinion. There's nothing wrong with making your music more accessible, to more people, regardless the reason. So ignore all this humbug balderdash and Follow the Leaders - they definitely know where they're going these days.