Gig review: Roddy Womble, Edinburgh Electric Circus

ON THE last night of the launch tour for Roddy Woomble’s third solo album, Listen To Keep, the sometime Idlewild frontman highlighted both the continuity and the development within his acoustic-based solo oeuvre – the latter perhaps most immediately in the strength and versatility of his current live and studio band, comprising fiddler/pianist Seonaid Aitken, guitarist Sorren MacLean (both also on backing vocals) and bassist Gavin Fox.

Roddy Woomble

Edinburgh Electric Circus

***

With MacLean also credited as co-writer on all the new album tracks, the core vintage folk-rock flavours of Woomble’s 2006 debut My Secret Is My Silence – from which several top cuts featured here, including the elegiac title track, the prayerful I Came Down From the Mountain and Waverley Steps, sung about 50 yards from its namesake thoroughfare – were attractively enriched by fresh Americana and pop stylings. Woomble’s non-Idlewild material has always been characterised by a degree of earnestness, sometimes almost a wilful gaucheness, in both its meditative subject matter and its often somewhat sprawling, densely-worded scansion and song structures. Allied with the resonant, soulful yet diffident timbre of his singing, the effect, at its best, again proved potent, with other highlights including The Last One of My Kind, Work Like You Can and Every Line of a Long Moment. Elsewhere, though, the lyrics’ seeming profundity ill concealed the gnomic woolliness beneath, while the rather narrow emotional register of Woomble’s downbeat delivery grew more apparent – which is where the band’s classy, vibrantly layered and varied contributions really came into their own.

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