Post Electric Blues

VINYL FORMAT. When Brit-pop was still in full-swing, Scottish rockers Idlewild were dropping out of art school and ingesting Fugazi, Superchunk and obscure American indie rock. When every new British band from Coldplay to Badly Drawn Boy trotted around with an acoustic guitar, they delivered their debut full-length of erratic punk rock, Hope Is Important. Now, Idlewild are releasing Post Electric Blues, an indie rock album of Boss-like bombast, flecked with '70s synths and dashes of brass. It's an album that leaps from Fleetwood Mac epic folk/rock/pop peaks into joyous Loch-side sing-alongs. It's the sound of a deft and defiant band (completed by Rod Jones on guitar, backing vocals, keyboards; Colin Newton on drums, percussion; Allan Stewart on guitar and Gareth Russell on bass), exploring soundscapes whilst finding hooks and generally, genuinely and quite clearly, having a fookin' good time. The album is both a leap forward for the band artistically as well as conceptually. In 2007, when Idlewild became an unsigned band due to their label's financial woes, they took a chance and instead of chasing a deal, asked their fans to pre-order the album. The result of the experiment was a triumph, with over 3,000 of their web-savvy tribe embracing the 2.0 record funding model. Whilst they waited for the record to be written and recorded, members of their fanclub-like online community saw and heard work-in-progress snippets of Post Electric Blues.