Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	80/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Consequence of Sound	B-
The Daily Telegraph
Drowned in Sound	8/10
The Guardian
Mojo
NME	6/10
Pitchfork	6.2/10
Q
Slant Magazine

The Take Off and Landing of Everything is the sixth studio album by English rock band Elbow, released in the UK, Europe, and Australia through Fiction Records and Polydor Records on 10 March 2014 and in the US on Concord Records on 11 March 2014.

Originally recorded with the working title of All at Once and then renamed Carry Her, Carry Me after a line in closing track "The Blanket of Night", the band changed their mind shortly before the album's release and settled on naming the album after one of its tracks. Singer Guy Garvey explained, "It's to do with the fact that there have been [so many] life events. There are five members of the band—people have split up, got together, had children. It never stops, this stuff. Especially round the [age of] 40 mark... and yet I wanted to remain celebratory about that. Everybody's feeling relief, with remorse, next to joy, next to loss. But I think laughing very hard and worrying very little is a good way to keep young."

Garvey split up with his long-term girlfriend, journalist and novelist Emma Jane Unsworth, during the making of the album, which led him to revise some of the album's lyrics. Talking about the album's opening track, "This Blue World", Garvey originally stated, "It's almost saying, everything from the beginning of time was leading up to the day we met. So that's very romantic, but something I'm fond of doing, when I'm offering a huge romantic gesture, is to point out the realities as well." After the break-up, he said that the song "was about this mythical mix of ex-girlfriends, it's really about her, it's this prophetic thing. I added some lyrics at the end, about imagining her going on and having a family without me, which is tough to swallow."

Unsworth also influenced some of the album's other tracks: she suggested the title of "My Sad Captains" from a line in Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra in which Mark Antony speaks about his drinking partners ("Come, let's have one other gaudy night; call to me all my sad captains; fill our bowls; once more, let's mock the midnight bell"). According to Garvey the song is about "missing my friends that have dropped out of the drinking culture that we all met in, or moved away, or died". The lyrics for "New York Morning" were adapted from one of Garvey's diary entries about a trip he and Unsworth made to New York City. In an interview on radio station XFM on 24 January 2014, he told presenter Jo Good that the lyrics were "pretty much verbatim, 6 o'clock in the morning, in Manhattan in the Moonstruck Café [named after the 1987 film Moonstruck], it's verbatim how I was feeling as the city was waking up". The track was called "The City" for a short while, until Elbow realised the implications of such a name in their home city of Manchester, where the two rival football teams of Manchester United and Manchester City are often referred to as simply "United" and "City", and the band could have been accused of being partisan. Garvey spent a large part of 2012 in New York while working on the King Kong musical, and he told Q magazine that the time he had spent in the city had been a big influence on the album, saying, "I'm having an intense love affair with Brooklyn. One overarching theme on this record is me flitting between Manchester and New York."

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