All bands grow older, either with each other or bickering amongst themselves in icy seclusion. Both of these behavioural patterns affect the music that the groups make. Either, like R.E.M., the boys are bashful enough with each other to just carry on regardless of anything but self-motivation and that they like spending time together. Whereas the Rolling Stones seem to prefer mutual exclusion and meeting every so often to complain about Ronnie Wood’s haircut and to discuss Mick’s latest conquests.
The surprise for many is that Idlewild as a band has recorded a third full album and released it, not in the surprise of them having a career, but in the sound of ‘The Remote Part’ of four young men finding maturity in their youth. Sure this is a band who could have been swallowed up by the Burroughsian maxim that has blighted most New Wave collectives since the Ramones – ‘Record, Rewind, Fast-Forward’ – destined to play out what has gone before and then repeat; only faster. A signifier most of all of mutual exclusion.
Therefore it should be no aural shock to discover that on Idlewild’s new album in wanting to avoid releasing a facsimile of ‘Hope Is Important’, they have continued to grow wiser and louder. There is no exploration of syncopation and tricky time signatures nor have they dispensed with distorted guitars, the addition of synthesizers suggests an adoption of something that has always been there just not used, grumble, grumble, grumble. Bad manners I know for Idlewild are not the Ornette Coleman Quartet and that alone is a blessing. The separating distance of now from then and the release from ‘Record, Rewind, Fast-Forward’ is the wish not to race as quickly as possible to the end and the flourish added to Roddy Woomble’s voice. Where once his shriek and repetitive screams matched the wound up art-punk register, now we hear a man as if annunciated by divine right to at least spare some time these days.
‘I Never Wanted’ does not bolt untamed, more the reined in volatility makes a song of simple rejection more difficult to contend with, suppressed rage has lent a greater articulacy and with this perhaps for improvement. Idlewild who once had astounding Les Eventements graffiti phrases contained in brief lines in lyrics – ‘Film For The Future’, ‘When I Argue I See Shapes’ – has extended the idea impact to incorporate the whole song. ‘American English’ with its condescending opinion on vapid youth and the sublimation of thought, an action mediated by comic books and Hollywood movies, could have been written as ‘I read beyond the wall,’ and not the long and haranguing put-down it is. A song that likes to curse and is more interesting for the time spent doing it; really mauling its subject.
When in the title song Roddy proffers ‘confusion is the best way possible,’ the blurring of what was once clear and brief and now considered but oblique shows a major distinction. In ‘Remote Part’ he does not feel to hoarsely cry image-packed but never linked lines of suggestion, now with contemplation and as a unit Idlewild work towards connected phrases that lead to a satisfied end and not an exhausted stop. When in ‘American English’ he castigates the Other by saying that when the song is over, due to the imbibing on false cultural documents the individual who he sings to will only sing words which contain an emptiness never to be filled, perhaps this action sees Roddy singing to what Idlewild once was or with foresight that which he will never return to, the brief, spat-out, and ultimately disposable punk of three years ago. The Remote Part is anything but this.