Idlewild are a band who have never garnered the popularity and critical acclaim that their music deserves. After their early sound was memorably branded “like a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs” by the NME, their subsequent transformation into more family-friendly indie rockers has been accompanied, in the most part, by a decline into rock obscurity. Mention Idlewild to the man on the street and you’re likely to win a baffled look, or else a reference to the vivid yet eminently forgettable hip-hop film of the same name; such is the failure of the Scottish quartet to permeate the wider public consciousness.
The problem with Idlewild is that they’re not quite sure who they are. It’s not that other modern rock bands have never changed their style – think of OK Computer next to Kid A, or compare the bullish early efforts of Travis to the wispy romanticising of Flowers in the Window – but that Idlewild are on the move too often to forge a lucid identity. It was precisely the success of OK Computer that allowed Radiohead later to experiment. Idlewild, meanwhile, never established themselves prior to this shift in style, and now nobody’s sure whether they’re sanguine punks or brooding melodic rockers. Faced with this dichotomy, A Distant History – which is basically a chronologically-arranged collection of the band’s B-sides – fulfils its potential to be a terribly disjointed and disunited compilation. But it does it so brilliantly that you shouldn’t care.
The tendency of the critics has been to approach this album from one end only. Rob Hastings is a fan of the ‘plaintive’ acoustic rendition of El Capitan towards the end of the album, but describes the band’s earlier, punkier efforts as ‘energetic… at worst, ridiculously inept.’ To Ben Marwood, meanwhile, the later tracks descend into a ‘borderline-Travis anthemic dirge’ in comparison with the excellent earlier songs. The point is that variety is a Good Thing; a point missed by the cabal of critics who decry Idlewild’s transformation and proceed to rave about the Stereophonics for spending ten years sounding exactly the same.
So have a listen to this album. Don’t come to it with any preconceptions, whether you’ve heard of Idlewild or not; try and appreciate the noisy, straight-out-of-school Queen of the Troubled Teens as much as the almost folksy Winter is Blue, and that acoustic version of El Capitan. You’ll see that the metamorphosis hides some degree of continuity – Woomble’s vocals have always been sincere, and the lyrics have always trodden the line between inspired and nonsensical – and hopefully also that it’s really rather good.
