Idlewild: A place to call home

For Roddy Woomble, 26-year-old singer and songwriter for the alt-rock band Idlewild, growing up cool and Scottish is to grow up with a conflict. Not a political conflict so much but a personal and even musical one.

On the band’s new album, “The Remote Part,” Woomble’s sublimated, introspective lyrics wrestle with the idea of belonging in a place with such a strong identity as the Scottish Highlands, while real contemporary identity is cobbled together from elsewhere.

Woomble should know. For two years at the dawn of the ‘90s, when he was 14 and 15, he lived in the U.S. and discovered the smarter side of American hard-core punk. He devoured discs by the Replacements, Minutemen, Husker Du, Minor Threat, Black Flag and, of course, the new contender that swept them all out of fashion: Nirvana. Back home in the small eastern coastal town of Carnoustie, these started a revolution.

“American indie rock, that was really the kind of music that excited me,” says Woomble, speaking from the band bus outside Denver, on a tour that brings Idlewild to the El Rey tonight. “We’d travel quite far from where we grew up in the north of Scotland just to see Americans holding guitars, you know? There’s some mystery and romance to it that you just didn’t have.”

And yet, in the ‘90s, there was increasing validation for the contemporary Scottish pop of bands such as Travis, the Delgados, Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai and others. So the thoughtful, fretful identity crisis began. Woomble and his bandmates began to pick the theme of identity apart slowly through their music.

At the University of Edinburgh in 1995, photography student Woomble met guitarist Rod Jones and drummer Colin Newton and formed an art-rock ensemble. Their first release was a 1997 single called “Queen of the Troubled Teens,” and by 1998, they’d released an EP, “Captain,” and a full-length album, “Hope Is Important.”

But on the band’s 2001 album, “100 Broken Windows,” the sound began to change.

“Windows” displayed a new emphasis on Woomble’s increasingly poetic lyrics and more sustainable melodies. There were still Fugazi turns, as in “Listen to What You’ve Got,” but sing-alongs such as “Roseability” belonged more to a post-Nirvana world.

With “The Remote Part,” Idlewild comes into its own. Released last year in the U.K., the singles “American English” and “You Held the World in Your Arms” were massive hits there, and Woomble’s passionate but unadorned, somewhat downcast lyrics are now surrounded by sweeping music that is as sophisticated as it is still young.

A lot of which, apparently, has to do with having pizza with former Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye.

“It was important for us to spend time with someone like Lenny, who made us think about rearranging our songs,” he says. “Sometimes it takes someone that you respect to make the most obvious suggestions seem like they’re valid.”

“American English” addresses the identity issue directly, calling into question the process of relating to songs, especially American voices, knowing they’ll “never be about you.”

This process led him into contact with Scotland’s poet laureate, 85-year-old Glaswegian Edwin Morgan, and to the album’s compelling title track.

After the two corresponded back and forth, Morgan wrote a poem about the tension Woomble found in being a young Scot. Morgan’s stately, wizened reading of it appears as the second half of a two-part song, “In Remote Part / Scottish Friction.”

“We’re speaking about the same thing, only it’s two different opinions,” says Woomble. “The whole notion of belonging somewhere, and that shaping people -- it’s actually kind of making a mockery of that.” Geography, he says, is far less important than one’s philosophical point of view. “You kind of have to decide that for yourself, and not enough people do.”

*

Idlewild

Where: El Rey, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: Tonight, 8

Cost: $12

Info: (323) 936-6400 or www.theelrey.com