Affection... Bands from Scotland Part 3

There's some songs that you hear them and they just strike a chord inside that resonates with you always. "American English" by Idlewild is one of those songs for me. Formed in Edinburgh in late 1995, the band's been through numerous label changes and a few personal changes, but they've still managed to mostly keep it together as a band with their last release being in 2007. Frontman Roddy Woomble did put out a solo album in 2006, but the band remains -Woomble and all.

I'll admit their debut 1999 album, Hope Is Important, didn't impress me. It was too America grunge in sound for a Scottish band for my tastes. Their next effort, 100 Broken Windows, was a step in a better direction for my tastes so I was kind of trying to pay attention to them at that point. But then in 2002, this perfect gem of an album arrives on our fine shores in the form of the album, The Remote Part. Idlewild were kind of quiet for a few years, but here I discovered they had metamorphosed into a band with a mature sense of their own artistic ambitions. Their experiences as young musicians planted each seed they needed to grow on, and the harvest that came not even ten years later yielded a powerful crop of songs that drove this incredible disc! There's a number of great albums that will always stand out in my mind from the summer of 2002, because it was my first summer back behind the counter at a record store, but this will always be remembered as one of the best. So many solid tracks, so many wonderfully urgent lyrics.

So here's the most rousing track of the 11 songs on The Remote Part, and probably the largest assemblage of white Christmas lights you'll ever see in a music video:

"American English" by Idlewild:



I think "I'm old without knowing anything's true"...