LONDON, UK (EMI) - Scottish quintet
Idlewild will release their fifth album, Warnings/Promises, in the U.S. on August 16th. The album is the first to feature the band's new lineup with bassist Gavin Fox and longtime touring guitarist Allan Stewart and was produced by Tony Hoffer (Beck, Air, Phoenix).
Warnings/Promises sounds like the work of a new band, and it is. It's their first album to be written collaboratively as a five-piece, and its songs - although clearly
Idlewild songs in essence - are broader, richer and more ambitious. It's the sound of this former punk band's confidence finally flowering, its mad buzz of ideas coming suddenly into focus.
"We were introduced to Britain as a brash punk band, and first impressions do last," says frontman Roddy Woomble. "But in
America we've always been perceived as a vaguely arty, literate rock band and I suppose that's closer to the truth."
That may explain why the nomadic Woomble moved to New York City's East Village during the writing of Warnings/Promises. "Norman Mailer said everyone should live in New York for six months, so I did," he explains. And Woomble and the group got to see much of
America from its mega-stages, touring with
Pearl Jam and acquiring a taste for stadium rock done right.
Idlewild retreated to their Edinburgh practice space with a new inter-band chemistry, notebooks crammed with ideas and a collaborative songwriting process in which the group simply sat down with acoustic guitars and wrote new songs from the bottom up, taking bare-boned hunks of melody and ideas and slowly working them into the tracks which would constitute the new album.
Once in their Edinburgh practice space the band simply sat down with acoustic guitars and notebooks filled with ideas, writing songs together from the bottom up. The new lineup immediately yielded changes - the addition of Gavin's vocals allowed the band to write three-way harmonies for the first time, and Allan's guitar would give new character to the instrumental arrangements, freeing up founding guitarist Rod Jones to follow his own more expansive flights of fancy.
The resulting songs were very much from Idlewild, but draw from a broader field of influences than before - most notably Roddy's love of country and folk and the unleashing of the band's innate rock beast (particularly on the squalling acid blues of "I Want a Warning") - all things never fully demonstrated before. And Roddy's lyric book eschews its more abstract gestures for more direct words wanting very much to be heard.
"This album's very easy to understand," says Woomble. "There's nothing cryptic about it at all. I like storytellers and I think people appreciate a plot. Life's just a collection of stories."
New songs in hand, the band repaired to L.A.'s Sunset Sound with producer Tony Hoffer, and otherwise embarked on the best summer of their lives - sharing a house with a swimming pool and lemon trees in the Hollywood Hills.
The songs were slowly whittled down to the dozen songs on Warnings/Promises and recorded with grand vision and a pulsing heart. From the slow-burn anthem of opener "Love Steals Us From Loneliness,"
Idlewild announce their new sound with a dense crunch of sunny melancholic harmonies and fine folk melody spun over deeply intertwined guitars. What follows mixes arty blare, bittersweet pop, and the raw embers of Americana - sometimes within a single song.
Idlewild, Warnings/Promises
1. Love Steals Us From Loneliness
2. Welcome Home
3. I Want a Warning
4. I Understand It
5. As If I Hadn't Slept
6. Too Long Awake
7. Not Just Something but Always
8. The Space Between All Things
9. El Capitan
10. Blame It on Obvious Ways
11. Disconnected
12. Goodnight
