Idlewild - Make Another World

Following their split from long-term label Parlophone, Idlewild took six months off before holing themselves away to record their fifth album, Make Another World. Sequestered from the wider music world, and free from the pressures of courting labels and thoughts of shifting units, the result is a return to the rock influences of days gone by. Seeing the band forget the antiquated folk of Warnings/Promises, it is filled with tinges of 100 Broken Windows. Occasionally treading over familiar paths, there's room aplenty for places where Idlewild have not yet dared to fly, where irony and a rare-seen verve float around as guitars trade riffs and solos as drums crash away in the background.

Opening with the Interpol-influenced 'In Competition For the Worst Time', the album is a 35-minute romp built from jagged chords and Woomble's little boy lost vocals. Ranging from the nigh-punk of first-single 'If It Takes You Home' to the rain-driven epics of 'Future Works' and 'Once In Your Life' to their quintessential 'Everything (As It Moves)', Make Another World is colder and just a little more distant that its predecessors. Rough and serrated, considered and mannered, it blooms with unpredictable stylistic shifts and changes in pace in a way that Idlewild albums never have. Volatile and contradictory, but never scattered, this appears more focused than anything they've done before.

Taking a refreshing step away from the folk-song-rock-song formula that has become a staple of Idlewild releases since The Remote Part, this is the sound of a band that no longer has anything to prove – of a band that seems, at long last, comfortable with itself and the way it wants to sound. Packed with the emotions and sounds of liberation and release, this is an effortless frolic that, finally, sees Idlewild find their way. [Neil Ferguson]