Roddy Woomble – Listen to Keep

The sleeve for Listen to Keep includes a snap of Roddy Woomble relaxing by a fireplace, shoes off and feet up. The music, meanwhile, evidences Woomble’s continued retreat from erstwhile noisiness, entrenching its maker deeper in the warm and familiar folk territories explored on predecessors My Secret is My Silence andThe Impossible Song & Other Songs. In short, not only does the former Idlewild frontman look comfortable on his third solo release; he sounds comfortable too.

This can be taken two ways. If you were to insist on looking for negatives, it’d be relatively simple to make a claim for the album’s pedestrianism, with smooth easy-listening melodies offering few surprises. But comfort needn’t imply complacency. While the components are often stock, their arrangement is consummately considered throughout, with tracks like The Last One of My Kind possessing a pronounced pop bent and housing some of Woomble’s most striking lyrics to date. [Chris Buckle]