Album Review : Idlewild – Post Electric Blues
- Written by Jamie Smith
It may come as a surprise to you to learn that Scottish rockers Idlewild are still going strong. Despite singer Roddy Woomble looking increasingly likely to go solo (he has released two folk albums with compatriot contemporaries) his main band continues to make enjoyable, melodic rock music.
It’s over ten years now since the band exploded onto the punk-rock scene with their thrillingly brief debut mini-album Captain, and over time their sound has mellowed considerably. Yet Post Electric Blues, their seventh record, harbours that early energy. In fact, it’s their best in years, and arguably up there with their finest album, 2003’s The Remote Part.
Of course, the method of release raised eyebrows. Fans were asked to pay £15 up front to fund recording. In return, they would receive downloads of live tracks, personal dedications in the album sleeve, and the record itself as soon as it was ready, months before release. Indeed, Post Electric Blues is unlikely hit the shelves until much later this year.
Those that have kept faith in the group after their dangerous wanderings into AOR territory will have wondered what the band would do next. Last summer Idlewild played a string of tiny club shows, supporting themselves acoustically before playing some of their most raucous live sets ever.
It hinted at a return to their roots, and Post Electric Blues threatens to follow up on that sweatily-delivered promise. Opening track ‘Younger Than America’ has a vaguely country feel to it, but the pace of it is a clear gear forward from their last effort, the tepid Make Another World.
The following two tracks, ‘Readers And Writers’ (likely to be the lead single) and ‘City Hall’, are among the band’s best ever output, and that is no exaggeration. They brim with a vitality rarely found in the band’s recent albums. Unfortunately, the rest of the album fails to live up to their excellence.
The soft and folky pair of songs ‘(The Night Will) Bring You Back To Life’ and ‘Take Me Back To The Islands’ seem more suitable for a Woomble side-project, not fitting in to the album’s rougher sound at all, and the album fades at the end. It’s a disappointment after such a promising start.
You can almost tell the most listenable tracks just from their titles. ‘Post-Electric’ is full of typically obscure Woomble lyrics, ‘To Be Forgotten’ is riff-heavy and enjoyable yet ironically not memorable and ‘Dreams Of Nothing’ again recalls their earlier work, with guitarist Rod Jones coming to the fore for the only time on the album to dominate proceedings with some deliciously scuzzy fretwork.
‘Take Me Back In Time’ combines the two personalities of the schizophrenic band better than anything else present. Shimmery guitars reverb around under Woomble’s customary plaintive vocals, but as usual when Idlewild betray their past, it’s too underwhelming to make an impact.
It’s far from a bad record and in fairness fans will find plenty to love here as they spend hours trying to decipher Woomble’s lyrics and interpret their possible meaning. ‘Readers And Writers’ is catchy enough to be their first hit single in years and there is a decent amount of depth to the material and it grows on you with each listen.
Post Electric Blues won’t win them any new plaudits or sell millions of records. An Elbow-like, and similarly deserved, breaking of the mainstream is highly unlikely. And with reflection, you just wonder how the band can continue with its two main creative forces quite clearly pulling in completely opposite directions.