IDLES
Tangk
★★★★
PARTISAN
IN ONE of the most thought-provoking entries in Aesop’s Fables, the North Wind and the Sun vie to prove themselves the stronger by attempting to strip a traveller of his clothing. Going first, the wind’s “violent gusts” only prompt the wayfarer to wrap his cloak more tightly around himself, and soon to put on another layer. Next up, the sun’s methods are more effective, its moderate rays enticing the fellow to shed his coat and then, at full blaze, to skinny-dip in a nearby river.
This much-referenced tale struck a deep chord with Idles’ firebrand frontman Joe Talbot. Perhaps reading Aesop to his daughter, Frida, now aged four, during his cogitations before devising the band’s fifth LP, he took on board its moral: “very of ten,” runs the text, “persuasion is more effective than force”.
It would be risible to suggest that Idles have thus far huffed and puffed, and got nowhere. Starting with 2017’s Brutalism, where Talbot exorcised the agony of six years as primary carer for his stroke-afflicted mother and her passing during the album’s gestation, the Bristolian post-punk unit have emerged as the most powerfully connective contemporary British alt-rock band.
The following year’s Joy As An Act Of Resistance and 2020’s chart topping Ultra Mono further honed their propulsive, post-punk inner machinery, amid unflinching themes: on the former, these ranged from toxic masculinity, racism and Brexit folly through to the stillbirth of Joe’s first daughter; the latter was a mid-therapy purgative blitz in a quest for healed selfhood.
While those early LPs took Idles into the mosh-pit super league, they weren’t for everybody. To more sensitive ears, they could seem overbearingly muscular in their full-beard shoutiness – a hostile environment, there for all the nasty things in life like a blocked drain, or a broken, xenophobic nation.
They ’ve since indeed sought other means beyond brute force – the art of persuasion. Barely a year after Ultra Mono came Crawler, where Talbot zeroed in on his own 15-year cycle of addiction amid differing soundscapes. That LP’s now best seen as transitional, en route to this fifth chapter in Idles’ saga, where there’s a good deal more to get excited about, and, to borrow its chief buzzword, to love.
Their quest for change was detectable in Tangk’s earliest manoeuvres: for initial woodshedding, guitarist and sonic mastermind Mark Bowen circled back to Nigel Godrich, who’d captured Idles’ performative tornado for his From The Basement series, and whose work on Radiohead’s Kid A/Amnesiac established him as an avatar of artistic transformation.
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As per title, Idea01 dates from the first Godrich-Bowen session at the producer’s Brixton facility in October 2022, its bass drum heartbeat, Satie-esque slo-mo piano and encroaching interference providing a backdrop for Talbot’s litany of childhood traumas salvaged from his unconscious – still psychic shock-and-awe, but couched in a more seductive soundscape.
Second track, Gift Horse, is more the Idles we know and headbang to: rhythm section Jon Beavis (drums), Adam Devonshire (bass) and Lee Kiernan (guitar) strike a thundering groove, punctuated by Bowen’s six-string clanks (hence the album title), and self-lionised in the accompanying rhymes: “Sinew exploding from chrome hooves/Where we’re going we don’t need glue/…Watch my steed go far/Look at him go!”
The aural purpose of Tangk is surely to present a more balanced picture of highs and lows, equine gallops and deep-diving meditations, with outbreaks of proper singing by Talbot, and production from Bowen and US hip-hop’s Kenny Beats coherently aligning the tough with the introspective. At track four, Roy’s fragile strike at immortality (“I’m never gonna die/ Ooh, take the posers instead”) is beautifully voiced over rolling drums and bass thrums, its arpeggiated bridge and erupting “baby-baby” chorus as bruised and emotive as anything you’ll hear in 2024.
Even closer to the bone, A Gospel is a nakedly heartbroken ballad (Talbot’s no longer with Frida’s mother), its drum-less rhythm kept by piano chords and pizzicato plucked violin. “Delete my number,” runs one achingly crooned verse, “I’m no more/Ignore my eyes, babe, they ’re just sore.”
Happily, Talbot is regenerating via the joys of parenting. In Gift Horse’s second half, he eulogises his daughter’s precocious wisdom (“My baby, she’s so raw/…Ask us to kneel and bow to the floor/She say no and ask what for”) before declaring her sovereignty over his dominion. “Fuck the king!” he barks. “He ain’t the king – she’s the king!”
Similar anti-monarchist themes run through another brittle beauty, Grace, while the brooding finale, Monolith, proclaims his recovery both from addiction and romantic upheaval with the clinching realisation, “I’ve found myself my own king”.
If, post-coronation, Charles III takes a battering here, the vibes are other wise far-reachingly amorous. Amongst the full-throttle bangers, Dancer is fabulously carnal in its imprecations, Talbot’s voice gruff and gnarly like Wu-Tang clansman Method Man around raunchy lines like, “My breath moves your hair”. As well as a private-dancing scenario, the chorus – “I give myself to you/As long as you move/On the floor” – implies another shapes-throwing transaction, between stage and mosh pit. This year and beyond, Talbot will have to give often: it’s a killer tune, auspiciously featuring LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang in a minor backing-vocals role.
Also lively, Hall & Oates’ title nods surely to that duo’s 1983 hit, Family Man, as Talbot bigs up his dad (“I loved my man from the ver y start/He turned forgiveness into an art”) and his brother, whereas Jungle reveals the depths Idles’ leader plumbed as an addict (“I found myself under a Scotsman’s boot” etc), his horror at his former self palpable in the anguished refrain: “Save me from me/I’m found, I’m found, I’m found!”
That Talbot, now 39, feels thankful to have emerged with his life is stirringly evoked in the album’s beating heart, Gratitude, where, Scrooge-like, he envisions his own funeral if he’d not sobered up, sparsely attended by “10 people that might cry”. His response: “I hold my hand up and say/That gratitude cuts through my veins”.
All told, Tangk is still hardly for the faint-hearted pop-picker, but it categorically repositions its makers as contenders in the biggest arena, as tuneful, approachable geezers capable of love, and sharing it with the world. Its aim is true, uplifting and, yes, mighty persuasive.
Tangk is out now on Partisan. You can order a copy here: Amazon/Rough Trade
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