Roddy Woomble is best known for his day job fronting the eloquent Scottish alt-rock band Idlewild. With a recent best-of album (Scottish Fiction: The Best of Idlewild) compiling the group's most stirring moments, it's a good time to direct attention to Woomble's mostly overlooked 2007 solo album, My Secret Is My Silence.
A surprisingly quiet and somber affair, the disc allows Woomble's rich brogue to infuse the landscape with a beautiful and hazy shade of grey — it's the sound of yearning and regret, of unrealized dreams, and of reflections on the price of silence. The title track best demonstrates the subtleties of Woomble's fine solo work: Buoyed by plaintive strings and wrapped in a sparse arrangement, his words connect the past and future, history and dreams, silence and secrets. It's virtually impossible not to fall under his rapturous, romantic, and utterly Scottish spell.
Listen to yesterday's 'Song of the Day.'
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