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Rating: Knowing how to evolve a performance into a rite that transforms from ceremony to manifesto is really not something everyone can do.
Performance, because Idles use physicality and the power of sound.
Ceremony, because they have a precise and unique order of construction in their way of expressing themselves.
Manifesto, because their message is a true proclamation where the content is always direct, with no possibility of being misinterpreted.
A crowd of 3000 people enclosed within the Alcatraz pit where sweat immediately takes the spotlight, where physicality is encapsulated in the first of the many proclamations of the evening: “the crowd: divide in two, Left and right and now…. collide!”, where “collide” means everything and not just clashing or entering into conflict. It means mingling, accepting, sharing, loving, moshing, giving oneself even with a stage dive of the guitarist on the heads of the public and the roadie extending the guitar cable. It is the word “love” that resonates more often than the spoken steps of Talbot, the great satrap of the ceremony. It's the acceptance of difference that welcomes the scum “I’m a scum” of society, but which stands against authoritarianism by expressly declaring itself “anti-fascist.” Love is remembering multiple times the Palestinian cause and the children of Gaza. The love of “Grace” and “Dancer” from the latest Tangk, which is truly an evolution from the past and where you can feel the Radiohead influence, the singing becomes more graceful, melodic, the guitar influences merge with electro passages, beats, as if wanting to offset for a moment the burst of adrenaline from 2 hours dense and saturated with sweat enough to pale Henry Rollins. It's expressing their “Gratitude” to the audience without whom they wouldn’t be on that stage at that moment. In “Mother,” you find the irony of how to anger a conservative “The best way to scare a Tory is to read and get rich” and then the invitation to the audience “Get down get down” to squat in a kind of sit-in rising gradually to the rhythm of Fuck the King. Inside the Idles you find the Gang of Four, at a certain moment I even recognized Siouxie and the Banshees on the guitar. They are avant-garde without knowing it because they are "beyond", certainly post because they are not just punk, they are an evolutionary act, as was post-rock from Louisville. I was really surprised by their communication style very similar to Rage Against the Machine, the latter certainly more refined musically, but equally direct (who remembers the concert at the Sonoria Festival '96?) where the power is the word, and the power of the word is sustained by the sound. A scene today in the English post-punk that includes very different souls: from DC Fontaines to Squid, from Dry Cleaning to Shame or Yard Act, but NONE of them have the same communicative capacity to reach straight to the heart and brain of the audience like Idles: none. They do not claim to be cerebral, they are simply true, clear and unique to themselves. A perfect setlist in which there is EVERYTHING of Idles. They celebrate punk by taking many tracks from Joy as an Act of Resistance, which was rightfully one of the best albums released in 2018 besides the already mentioned “i’m a scum” (“Denny Nedelko”, “Samaritans”, “Colossus”, “Never fight a man with a perm”, “Rottweiler”) as Nirvana did, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Mark Bowen appears on stage with a skirt. They end with Rottweiler, with a monstrous drumming crescendo where the punk ceremony transforms into a noise wall à la Swans. Fantastic!
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