Hear No Evil, Drink No Evil - Elbow's "The Take Off and Landing of Everything" + Real Ale's Blakkr Black Ale Collaboration
Special beer releases are always a danger to my personal cash reserves, and further still, special collaboration beers tend to manifest that tendency by about triple.
Yet, the puzzling reality of collaboration beer is that they often tend to be considerable letdowns; ‘too many brewers in the kettle’, I often think. In the larger picture, collabs suffer from a theoretical fragmentation as would Yeats’ political thorniness interpreting Keats’ romantic narrative. It is both magic and nonsense. Magical nonsense. Rarely does it work the way it was intended.
As you may have guessed -- given this cautionary introduction – Real Ale’s Blakkr Black Ale (in conjunction with Indiana’s III Floyd’s Brewing and Minnesota’s Surly Brewing) has managed to discover the true plot of a collaborative beer. Nary are the setbacks, the disasters, the obstacles of teamwork clumsiness. In the business world, the saying is, “None of us are as stupid as all of us”, and that applies to most collaborations not named Blakkr.
In essense, Blakkr is a brewing anomaly, and it is fucking genius.
To wit, Blakkr cannot -- and should not – be pinned to a single beer style. Blakkr is a pantheon of wondrousness – a merger of styles ranging from a bittered black IPA in the first 1/3 of the beer to a positively tantric malty imperial porter in the latter 1/3 of the pitch. The middle third is open for interpretation, but the beer divides without fragmenting, as sudden in development as the discovery of a graying hair in the bathroom mirror. It is positively nimble and tessellated. Graceful and a little bit sexy.
And if one happens to be seeking a further complexity, a deeper descent into the rabbit hole vortex of blackness, then one should certainly consider the sullen musical loitering of Elbow’s most recent release, The Take Off and Landing of Everything.
In fact, when evaluating the most effective use of one’s free time, there is hardly anything better than spending it with carefully conceptualized beer and music.
Elbow’s emotional core has always been somewhat unapproachable for the listener more inclined to a diet of pop songs, but The Take Off and Landing of Everything angles more towards a cloak of protection between Top 40 ballads and the soft cotton of indie rock, like a Bon Iver recording, sung by a man with actual balls.
The record starts in a bittered dank hole and finishes in an extraterrestrial swath of dark matter, unreactive to light or radiation, a ballet of anguish and charm, a symphony of despair and amusement; a statistical sample of ordinary life, treading the line between hypnotically engaging and just plain dull.
Elbow's The Take Off and Landing of Everything is a perfect pairing to Blakkr because all of its vivacity is forward, then bankrupts your expectations with the odd comfort of falling into torpidity. Its time for some personal discovery with both.
