IDLES with Live4ever @ SXSW 2017 (Paul Bachmann)
Idles’ ‘Brutalism’ was Live4ever’s #1 album of 2017.
IDLES will put out a 5th anniversary version of their debut record Brutalism on December 9th, the digital edition coming with their surprise live set on the BBC Introducing Stage at Glastonbury earlier this year.
“What started as a headstone slab of indulgence and unrest became a long journey of beauty, forgiveness, and gratitude,” Joe Talbot has said.
“Little did we know that it was not just a headstone but the foundations we were building, for a house full to the brim with loving human beings. Thank you so so much.”
In our review of Brutalism, we summed the record up as a, ‘compacted, suffocating, brilliant mess’, with an energy that, ‘invites new perspective’:
“Its humour is often the blackest (and therefore the best),” it reads. “On the scabrous reel of Exeter, the Devonshire town’s cultural abyss is dissected viscerally, from the man who ‘punched himself in the face to prove he isn’t gay’, to the half a dozen Begbie clones who congregate in pubs on the off chance of self instigated violence.”
“Not much of the things we cling on to are safe here, whether it’s the delusion of organised religion and fatalism (Faith In The City) or the risible locked in syndrome of the consumer on the frenetic opener Heel Heal. In lesser hands this would simply be an avalanche of sneering invective, the liberal elitez mocking the wrongs with misplaced hubris.
“Equally, the likes of Future Of The Left turned dead panned flaming non sequiturs into killing yr. idols even before the country’s politics lurched so conveniently right.”
