September 27, 2007

Idlewild: 'Scottish Fiction: Best Of 1997-2007'

'This traces their descent from brilliant to bland'

5 / 10 Funny band, Idlewild. Starting life in the mid-’90s as a thrilling, lo-fi indebted noisepop group with a brilliant mini-album in tow (1998’s ‘Captain’), the Scottish outfit then polished up and became a quaintly glossy indie pop band with ‘Hope Is Important’ in late 1998.

Then they decided they’d like to be REM (on 2000’s ‘100 Broken Windows’), then Coldplay (on 2002’s ‘The Remote Part’), then utterly shit (everything thereafter). Subsequently, this is a flawed ‘Best Of’ because it doesn’t include many of their best songs. Sure, not many tracks are as achingly pretty as ‘Let Me Sleep (Next To The Mirror)’ or as plain nutzoid as ‘When
I Argue I See Shapes’ but that aside, this traces their descent from brilliant to bland. That’s not funny at all, just quite sad.

James McMahon

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