IDLES have released their fifth studio album Tangk this week – revisit Live4ever’s review and stream it right here.
“It says something about the current plight of society that when Joe Talbot declared that the new Idles album is, in their own way, all about love, you had to pause to check whether you’d heard it correctly.”
“Love is, after all, a thing in critically short supply these days, be it when manifesting itself in empathy, forgiveness or looking in a mirror and not seeing some kind of personal failure.”
Talbot, to his credit, was resolute, explaining that fatherhood and the unconditional devotion that it brings had greatly shaped his thinking. All told, the word features 29 times on Tangk, a manifesto summed up on Grace with the explanatory couplet: ‘No god, no king, I said love is the thing’.
“There hasn’t always been a lot of love for Idles either from peers, the media and other assembled sceptics, but whilst the slogan-heavy agitprop of their third album Ultra Mono – an exercise in self-parody which broadly missed its targets – might’ve been a big step back, undaunted the quintet returned barely a year later with Crawler, a bleak but revelatory assemblage that was both artistic reset and career intervention.”
Click here for the review in full
