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IDLEWILD
Hot Scots

If Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble seemed sullen stalking the Paradise stage a week ago Tuesday, he had his reasons. For starters, there was the bad bottled water — a Coca-Cola product. And as is so often the case with British charttoppers who can’t get arrested anywhere in the US, he was having chronic monitor problems. Yep, "The older you get, the more you seem jaded," as he himself crooned in "I Want a Warning," the third track on Idlewild’s third and best US release, Warning/Promises (Capitol). Oh yeah, and there’s the disc’s release date: originally scheduled for mid August, the album had hit stores earlier that day, September 6. Woomble, a perfectly unkempt Scot with a perfectly mussed bedhead, all straight out of an Irvine Welsh novel, made a point of pointing out the "record-label delay." More to the point, he fronts what has to be the most consistently overlooked, underrated, and misunderstood British band of the past decade.

His mood didn’t seem to bother the rest of the happy-to-be-here band, or the Anglophile-heavy crowd, who hung on his every word as if they’d been listening to downloads or imports of Warnings/Promises all summer. It’s a (re)defining album that takes the best of what Idlewild used to be (cynical romantics trapped in what the Brit press mislabeled a "Nirvana-type punk" band), widens the scope of the music, and puts greater emphasis on Woomble’s literate lyrics. (Hell, he name-dropped Gertrude Stein on 2001’s 100 Broken Windows.) The Paradise gig started with the Bleached-out distorted guitar anthems before giving way to songs heavy with strummed acoustic and crafty melodic guitar hooks — songs that incorporate rootsy influences (Celtic strums, Nashville pedal steel) on the CD — while retaining the raw overdrive of Broken Windows. The beauty and the sadness of the hooks and the harmonies and the minimalist poetry of songs that start with lines like "Mountains wouldn’t part for me/They have no uncertainty" as well as the natural tone of Woomble’s voice recalled a more dynamic R.E.M. And if Woomble doesn’t find what he’s looking for on this tour — "A kiss that tasted like drugs/Which tastes like we’ll never ever make it home," to quote one lyric — he can always reflect on the Richard Brautigan quip that adorns back of the CD insert: "It is an old story/Somebody comes into this place and lives/And then goes away forever."

BY MATT ASHARE

Issue Date: September 16 - 22, 2005
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