Idles
Brutalism

A friend writes to us in the editorial office that Brutalism has crushed her sternum to the ground and crapped on her face while licking it. We, being a bit obscene, say well, let's try it.
When Brutalism finally ends and we can catch our breath again, we can contract the diaphragm, we finally scream

P O S E R

First of all, because we listened to the 2012 EP, and it seems suspicious to us that an average band similar to the Foals, wannabe-National, bland like the worst Doves, has been in the Bristol niche for five years and then threw out a Molotov record like Brutalism.
Granted, the '15 EP was pretty tight, but there's a doubt: all this proletarian anger from the Labour Party, all this punk attitude, is it something that can come with time? If at thirty-five years old you have been broke and now you realize what a crap the welfare state is, and how many contradictions there are, and your friends and family have started dying, it's not that you've become punk.
Then if at the Pohoda Festival you show up in a bathing suit and play the guitar in all possible plastic poses; if you stagger in a beer can and dressing gown and get angry with the cables (while even that bourgeois Morrissey at sixty years old plays games with the cables), and you do the thing of imitating Liam Gallagher with your hands behind your back, but the microphone at waist level, you're kind of giving us reason to think.
Then Talbot, the singer, says he doesn't like being defined as post-punk. Yet we agree that like a Motorhead album, this would not have been well received by fans nor by anyone.

[Someone tells me it looks like the band of the dad of Lollipop from This Is England, the actor. Reporting.]

A Fall album was also released this year, but now MES is almost incomprehensible. And when you read the lyrics, it's not clear what he means. This is a shame because MES is someone who has the right to pose in a certain way. Because MES always succeeded, even in pop, without ever trying: trying in the sense of trying hard, in the sense of trying hard, in the sense of posing.
Now that MES's pulpit is a wheelchair in the industrial gray of Manchester, and his pose is as static as his jaw, some guidelines come to mind for all the Idles, the Sleaford Mods, and all the angry, more or less young, men to come, to never make us doubt again:

-Make a couple of albums like this a year. What's this story that you took five years to make an album.
-Don't play at Primavera Sound.
-Play instead at Glastonbury and piss yourself on stage.
-Go on as if nothing happened.
-Get out of the safe zone. If the poetics are as strong as they seem, you can make an album just harmonica and voice, and it's the same. Run The Jewels redid the second album using only sampled cat sounds: it's a joke but it's also great.
-Shave.
-Do more dates, in smaller places.

I say, because then names like the Fall always come up, on authoritative sites, when talking about these records. But one must also deserve certain references.
On the facade of a building here in town, it reads: TO DO SOMETHING YOU LIKE IMITATE SOMETHING YOU LIKE.
And if we were only talking about sound, all records produced in a certain way would be beautiful.

In '17 everything exists, so there are posers of everything as well. So let's pretend we're not interested in the story of authenticity and pose.
It's true that this album pushes.
The hinges are the usual: roll the snare, play the high power chords with the chorus and alternate with tremolo picking, slap a Precision, abound with gain on the Ampeg, punk hardcore dynamics in fast tracks, new wave cadences with the tom in slow ones. It's a sport, but the rules are very simple and those who decide to participate always win.
The Idles in particular remind me a lot of the McLusky plus farbrutto, consequently the Future Of The Left, and much due to Joe Talbot's moving performance, who rarely intones and has his own musicality of accents, pauses and long and short pulls, yelling and trying to yell when out of breath, howls, phlegmy blobs. He alternates the growl with the mocking to the solemn declaiming like a John Lydon in phase. To rant is to be carried away with anger by a discourse and drag it beyond its spontaneous course: to wheeze.
It doesn't apply to Slow Savage, which is a ballad, left last not to risk: cowards, but they did well.

Talbot's mother died, and the writing was affected by it. When Talbot in Mother says that the best way to scare a conservative is to read and get rich, he is not making a manifesto. His mom worked too much and he prefers to watch television. At the BBC he sees these people like food bloggers like Mary Berry who have a degree, job, money; someone asks him, in Well Done, why he doesn't get on with it too: «I'd rather cut my nose off, to spite my face».
Well Done, despite the compressed sounds of an alternative group, is also the best garage punk I've heard this year.
Date Night follows the line of anti-small-bourgeois disdain, adds grammatical errors thrown in the face as a chorus. Work disdain again, then 1049 Gotho, which is an asteroid orbiting around the Sun while people on Earth are so depressed but this thing was already done more or less by Von Trier. Divide & Conquer is a dark march on dying for being too poor and not being able to afford care. Stendhal Syndrome - which is what sticks with you the most, and also the fastest - and it is not clear if the narrator suffers from it despite his ignorant rationality making him despise art, or if rather he is mocking an ignorant approach to art, or again if he is using an ignorant approach to art to mock someone affected by Stendhal syndrome: anyhow hot air, more grammatical errors.

In White Privilege, Talbot manages to say: «how many optimists does it take to change a light bulb? None: it's the servant who changes the light bulb. Always poor, never bored»; and «always poor, never bored» is the chorus.