(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
English quintet Idles, after a false start with the mediocre EPs Welcome (2012) and Meat (2015),
revitalized punk-rock on their album Brutalism (2017) with lightning-speed songs that pit
raucous pub-grade shouter Joe Talbot against the
incendiary guitars of Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan and the
relentless rhythm section of Adam Devonshire (bass) and Jon Beavis (drums).
The limit of the project is that it sounds like a compendium of punk-rock
of the 1970s. There are echoes of
Clash,
Fall and
Stiff Little Fingers, as well as of their
American counterparts (Ramones,
Cramps) all over the album,
from the savage psychobilly of Heel / Heal to the
panzer voodoobilly of Divide & Conquer,
from the ska-tinged Mother to the
Devo madness of 10:49 Gotho.
There is a comic undercurrent in the musichall steps of Well Done
and in the emphatically poppy refrain of Benzocaine (over a feverish whirling rhythm), perhaps the album's most successful gag.
There are more complex ideas in Date Night and
Rachel Khoo that don't lose the energy.
Nothing that we haven't heard before (a few hundred times), but nonetheless
amusing and occasionally exciting.
Unfortunately, the Idles lost most of their "brutalist" energy on
Joy as an Act of Resistance (2018), the typical sophomore-album letdown.
If you make it past the agitated (but rather tedious) Colossus,
the magniloquent (but a bit clownish) Never Fight a Man with a Perm,
and the poppy Danny Nedelko (a lame imitation of Green Day),
you may enjoy the
wild tribal charleston beat of I'm Scum and the one tune that is both
visceral and melodic, Television.
Not much else to salvage.
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