Idles – Tangk (Partisan, 2024)

And so finally I find myself with guys who are as usually younger than me at Dissonanze, a record shop that opened less than a month ago, enjoying the first listen to Tangk by Idles, after purchasing a copy of the album I’m talking about.

Equalization problems of the stereo for the night aside, the first track is already a shock, with that piano at the end that makes you think of Radiohead. But the surprises aren't over, given that in Pop Pop Pop, the third track of the album, the overall sound of the band reminds me a lot of that of Geogaddi's Boards of Canada.

It's just that the album, produced by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead of course, and Beck above everyone else) and Kenny Beats (a life behind the console of various hip hop records) together with guitarist Mark Bowen, is obviously the furthest thing from Idles sound that the Bristol band has accustomed us to.

There are Gift Horse's palm mute guitars and Roy's effected ones, but evolution was still in the air from the time of the previous Crawler, listening to which many turned up their noses not so much for the distance from the past but for the clear attempt to write, at times, songs for old fans.

Moreover, Bowen himself in an interview with an Italian webzine declared that he enjoys playing live in Italy because our audience experiences all their songs well, while other audiences around the world take a possible slow piece in an unresponsive manner.

And here, inside Tangk, there are plenty of mid tempos or ballads, or more thoughtful moments. A Gospel also plays with slowed down rhythms, wonder and (toy?) pianos, and for once I have to admit that I was wrong: Idles are not the Ramones of post-punk as a wrote last year.

They could be defined as such until Ultra Mono, their fastest and most hymnical work, but from a couple of albums onwards they have distanced themselves from the carbon paper effect to take on a full artistic caliber.

After all, we don't need another copy of the post-punk of the Seventies or Eighties, a sound that was innovative and succulent but which today risks to become stale and to create environments where one plays at being hard and pure and then dies unheard and ready to be forgotten. Guess who I'm quoting if you can – it’s not a post punk band anyway, but it’s a record from last year.

Obviously the links with the past can be felt in songs like Dancer, but also in the lyrics we have gone from mocking the politicians of the early days and from the desire to push homophobes into coffins to a praise of love and empathy which according to Talbot and associates remains a non-romantic but still political act in a world dominated by fear and anger.

Of course, the drums still sound like clean and smooth drum machines as always as in Grace, while the rest of the instrumentation follows the most precise sound possible as not to disfigure with John Beavis' sticks and skins.

I had misjudged this first single upon its release, but, certainly as I had guessed after a while, in the context of the album it makes a good impression with those distortions at the end that somehow disfigure the basic assumption.

And then, should the world collapse, there are still the powerful riffs like in Hall and Oates which in some way recall a theory of more or less alternative groups starting from the Monkeys, or the tribalisms of Jungle, precisely.

And while we all wonder how these pearls will sound live, my mind goes back to when I was a teenager and an album was released and misunderstood until it was played in stadiums – I’m talking about Pearl Jam's No Code, with which this album has nothing in common to share but the opportunity to be misjudged.

I don't know what you will read in these columns in the future. The new albums by Kim Gordon and Moor Mother will be released on March and J Mascis' latest release is still circulating. I'd like you to read about things you don't hear elsewhere, and I'm almost preparing myself to. We will see. As of now, get a copy of this new work by Idles and love it, and try to love yourselves too.