Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
It may be lost on many people, the population it seems too eager to embrace the now and immediate, but the point of getting older is not forgetting that to tell a story you must have first have lived, that you must experience the jumbled paragraph long before you find the control to write down the novel.
To believe that by the time you are 20 or even in your 30s that the story has been written and that you can live off the ending forever is one that surely rankles, it is fool hardy and irresponsible, it is to feed the spectre of the deceiver a feast to which it will grow fat and your ideas grow thin. It is a mantra and belief that Roddy Woomble has arguably put into practise across the time of being a creative soul and inspirational vocalist of Idlewild; it is one in which you know he will never feed The Deluder of men’s souls but instead harness its energy and give his audience the music they readily deserve.
Roddy Woomble’s The Deluder is reflective; the narrative one of enlightenment, of finding that the path is still open and all that was left behind in the past is still able to push gates open for you as you walk into pastures new.
We look back on the decades of our youth with awe, it is after all the times that shapes us, yet for all that is to come, if we dismiss them as just time as a creature baying for our blood, we are given context, we write the lines with a greater clarity; we are no longer the heroic child, we are the contemplative scribe who sees past the outrageous tales and instead begins to explain the truth of our being.
The Deluder is poetic, it is the spoken song and the valiant gift, each passing moment is a reminder of what the likes of Leonard Cohen brought to the stage and to the recording. In tracks such as To Feel Like A Fool, A Skull With A Teardrop, the superb First Love Is Never Returned and I’ll Meet You By The Memorial, Roddy Woomble excels defiantly but with a sense of love in his heart, a sentiment of holding a glass up to the world and saying thank you.
A marvellous album by one of Scotland’s finest, epic and graceful, The Deluder is no trick, it is no misleading character, it is honest and approachable, a moment of absolute clarity by the Idlewild frontman.
Roddy Woomble releases The Deluder on September 1st. Roddy Woomble will be performing at the o2 Academy in Liverpool on September 2nd.
Ian D. Hall