Listening to music from your past when in a moment of turmoil always seems to take you back to a simpler, more secure moment in your timeline. Undoubtedly, this is in part down to hindsight being an exacting art but it's more than that. Music can work as a touchstone in this world ever in flux. It reminds you of something stable at the centre of your core. If you still love this band you listened to as a kid then you haven't lost everything of who you were back then too.
This is what springs to mind as I revisit 100 Broken Windows by Idlewild. 'It's a better way to feel when you're not real, you're post modern'. I wonder if the hipsters I see wandering about my neighbourhood in Shoreditch follow this mantra. The first time I ever heard of Gertrude Stein was when I listened to Roseability and even when I studied her at university in Glasgow, Roddy Woomble's words followed me back up to Scotland and floated around my head all day after lectures.
A truly great album is one that can sit untouched for years and then when you do dust it off and put it on it has transformative power. As much as I want to skip through to my favourite tracks, every time the next song comes on I am reminded of why I loved it in the first place even if it had faded in my mind and I think to myself 'oh, I'll just wait until this one's over until I put on Actually It's Darkness'. In the end I know it'll come all in it's own time. Probably just the way they engineered it to in the first place.
I challenge anyone who grew up with 90s/early 00s indie (you know, before Fran Healy and co. spoilt it with The Invisible Band - I was going to say The Man Who but then I remembered I really like Writing To Reach You) to listen to this album and not break out into a giant heart-warming smile as you remember the good times.
Even the interruptions of the incessant Spotify ads can do little to dampen the enjoyment of listening to this album from start to finish (incidentally the best way to listen to almost every album). A touchstone like this can help you to take stock of your life and your position within it. You can see how far you've come, changed, (even evolved perhaps?) and you might even get a clearer vision of how far you've got left to go and the way in which you might get there.
Even if it doesn't quite send you on a mystical quest, I would recommend that everyone who reads this stops everything they're doing right now and finds an album that they haven't listened to in years from an earlier era in their life and put it on from start to finish and just simply enjoy. My Christmas present to you all, if I could give one, is that I make you remember how good music can be and how fantastic it can make you feel. Be a kid again for an hour or so and love it.
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.
