The Remote Part

Here are a few trivial pursuits that came to mind while listening to Idlewild’s third full album The Remote Part:

(i) Picking spitballs off the ceiling of Room 3B in my old alma mater.

(ii) Indexing all the cleaning products in the kitchen cupboard by date of expiry.

(iii) Perfecting that tricky duvet-cover on duvet operation.

All of which I came to regard with a wistful fondness about halfway through this record.

Okay, snippy opening, but here’s why:

Somewhere around ten or fifteen years ago the term ‘indie’ ceased to denote music distributed by an independent label – or at least, a subsidiary of a major – and became a euphemism for a genre distinguished (or not) by jangly guitars, a limited rhythm vocabulary and vocalists in thrall to Morrissey, Michael Stipe, Jeff Buckley or whoever the hell had been selling throughout the previous couple of years. Such acts are still a dime a dozen. Starsailor, Embrace, Badly Drawn Boy – the names change but the facelessness remains the same, a plethora of et ceteras whose intrinsic dishwateriness makes the soul shrivel.

Idlewild are the unfortunate end product of years of such indie-breeding.

It’s not that The Remote Part is a bad record – a bad record would be entertaining in a rubbernecker kinda way, and besides, there are thousands of pop pickers who’ll be walking home clutching this platter to their breasts with love and gratitude over the next month. But to this customer, Idlewild are like lettuce, like white bread, like non-alcoholic beer or overcooked vegetables. Roddy Woomble’s voice is serviceable, the rhythm section and guitarist are somewhere between solid and so-so, and Stephen Street’s production sounds exactly as you’d expect. It could be just another night at the Baggot circa 1993. In short, Idlewild bore the axel grease out of me, apart from when they sound a bit like Bob Mould (‘A Modern Way Of Letting Go’) or let loose the odd eight to sixteen bars of gratuitous noise (‘Stay The Same’) – and even then it’s gratification by association. The best thing about this collection is a cameo by Scottish poet laureate Edwin Morgan, and even that sounds clumsily shoehorned into the mix.

When I’m on my deathbed about to croak, I’ll want my 38 minutes refunded.