A Hollow Hole of
Riches – The Birthday Suit
The thunderous first notes of album leadoff track “You Held
the World In Your Arms,” off Idlewild’s 2002 album The Remote Part, were a magical and daunting reveille. After a few seminal and rough-hewn minor
league introductory albums heard by a few dozen Scottish indie brats, Idlewild
crashed into the middle of the stage and made a shocking case that they were
out to be the best band in the world.
Their case was legitimate.
All of the requisite boxes for one-off rock immortality were
neatly and improbably checked. Brilliant
guitars; dynamic melodies; gorgeous and layered instrumentation—sounding very
much older and more realized than the age of the band, and its members, gave
listeners the right to expect. Capping
off the entire thing was a defiantly weird frontman whose lyrics never veered
uncomfortably close to clarity. Roddy
Woomble sang like a 2000s iteration of 1980s Michael Stipe: with a pretty voice, and with nifty,
evocative sentence fragments that sounded organically fused to their attendant
melodies.
There were other, also excellent albums to follow. But there were also worsening course
wanderings, including Woomble’s steepening fascination with Scottish folk
music, and his fulminating fear of airplanes.
Without triumphant—or even dutiful—world tours, and with the competing
scheduling demands of recording solo projects while surrounded by sheep and
rocks, Idlewild fizzled in a way that brilliant noise never, ever should.
Not all was lost.
Guitarist Rod Jones (really, the biggest mistake Idlewild ever made was
not hiring a bassist named Rodney and a drummer named Roderick) has spent the last
several years wet-nursing follow up band The Birthday Suit, which as of early
2014 is now two-and-a-half albums old—the partial credit given for an earlier album of
cover versions. And while some tincture
of weirdness has evaporated from the new outfit’s milieu, much of it
remains—and so do all of the gloriously noisy guitars and dynamic song
structures.
The folk music lament of earlier paragraphs earns a fairly
hilarious nod within the first seconds of album leadoff track “A Bigger
World.” (The world being bigger than
rocks and sheep and lazy simplicity; one cannot help but smirk.) A would-be folk instrument of string has been
accelerated to unnatural speed, and then driven back behind the barn with a
thunderous guitar line.
The world is bigger than your burnt
ideas,
And your jealous eyes.
The world is so much bigger than
your home.
And the world is bigger than your
version of self-sacrifice,
Our world is so much bigger than
your own,
Much bigger than you know,
Much bigger than you owe.
All true. This is no
softly spun piece from the Highlands. It
is a gigantic and hostile narrative of the failure of narcissism. It makes for a catastrophic error of criticism to
assume that biography over-informs an artist’s work, but lines such as the
those above sound an awful lot like what might happen when the lead guitarist
walks up to the mic and gets a few things off his chest.
Jones, it has turned out, shares a surprising amount of
vocal gravel, and gravity, with Woomble—if a smidgeon less loft. Both of them boast voices that are gloriously
rough around the edges and which sound purpose-built to live in the company of blazing guitars. The singing here is
competent and suits the songs well. But
it is above all the guitar-led sound of A
Hollow Hole of Riches that repeatedly snares the listener. Jones knows how to put together a rock
song. A bunch of them, actually: rocking and nasty; midtempo and interesting;
quiet and piercing.
By the title track number 4, all pertinent skills are in
broad display. The lyrics about faith initially
clunk along a little bit, but the song’s chiming melody forgives this, and its
booming, arcing chorus erases all doubts about what is happening here. There are female vocals in the mix now, and a
frankly stunning guitar accompaniment screaming at the margins of distortion
through the background. To close
listening, especially via headphones, the results are breathtaking. Moreover, the lyrics at this point have
vanquished any tendency toward clunky:
Oh, if
heaven had sent you,
It should
have gone well;
If heaven
had sent you,
Then I’m
going to hell.
This is perhaps a bit more to-the-point than a typical
Idlewild song, but it does not suffer for being so. Moreover, by the back half of the track the
melody and instrumentation have grown so triumphantly beautiful that Jones’
former band no longer quite seems to be the point. Rather it only matters that this man is
making music—still and again—and that the results continue to thwart the
universe’s ability to ready itself for them.
A hallmark of the mastery on display here is the uniform
tendency to layer these songs. Jones is
seemingly incapable of putting down a melody without instinctively dreaming up
one or two random-but-perfect flourishes to paint across the background. To borrow from the R.E.M. analogy again, it
is the type of thing that Mike Mills and Bill Berry used to regularly do in and
around Peter Buck’s deliberate guitar or mandolin melodies…except that in this
instance, of course, it would appear that one mortal is now accomplishing the
work of three minor gods.
The second half of the album is loaded. “Love Isn’t Love” is a ballad boasting
another wonderful chorus, and follow up track “Tonight Is Broken Hearted” is
the type of slow-fuse-to-huge-explosion experience that used to be right in the
Idlewild wheelhouse, except this one is better. It takes every bit of seventy seconds and a
fake-out chorus before the real deal ignites—and when it finally does, the
guitar, vocal and drums combination might be the best thing yet on this
thoroughly excellent album.
Updates from involved parties make it clear that the wraps
are almost complete on an Idlewild re-emergence album—the band’s first output
in five years. The erstwhile emergence
and full flower of The Birthday Suit therefore leaves us twice blessed. A dispatch from early 2014: anything that Rod Jones puts his guitar to,
now and forever, will be something that thwarts the universe’s ability to ready
itself. Maybe once, sometime, the result
will be due embrace.
Keepers: 1-11
April 2014
