Idlewild: Everything Ever Written
Mike Diver, The Quietus, 9 February 2015
IDLEWILD HAVE been a band for twenty years now, and doesn't it show. The blood-rush riots that passed as early gigs have slipped beneath tangible memory to become simply a feeling, a wisp on a wind that becomes a whole only when stirred by a revisit to Hope Is Important. The manoeuvres that took the Scots from scrappy punks who could barely play to sensible-shoed R.E.M. analogues, encapsulated in the 2002 album The Remote Part, have had their tyre tracks followed ever since — and Everything Ever Written, the group's first LP since 2009's Post Electric Blues, makes no dramatic move through the gears.
Total word count of piece: 725