Idles
Joy as an Act of Resistance

THE REVIEW

If you're happy
Listen to Joy
If you're sad
Listen to Joy
If you're Angry
Listen to Joy

If the first album by Idles delivered brutal blows to our temporal lobe, the part of the brain with the ears, Joy must be listened to carefully like one of those double entendre jokes your friend tells you in the metro, whispering and then raising his voice during the screeches of the turns.
Colossus, the first single, I had to listen to over and over to say "what kind of album is this?". The one written by an English working class hero who tells his story and describes the society around him: racist, pumped up, alcoholic, brutal but still full of disarming desire for meaningful relationships (Cry to me) because "loneliness is just a waste of time"! On stage, we find an epileptic Ian Curtis singing Tom Waits lyrics accompanied by the Sex Pistols and then by the Swans (June): this is Fucking GREAT!
After the intimate tones and the story of a paternal legacy that completely adheres to your being without ever peeling off ("I'm my father's son / his shadow weight a ton) Talbot, Idles' frontman, shows us the new cocaine-addicted barbarians, pumped up and with a perm. Being hated by these "walking glands" is a badge of honor: "He hates me/ and I like that" we hear in "Never fight a man with a perm." The portrait of these men is grotesque, merciless but also biting and ironic: if you were to turn around in the metro or at the gym, you would certainly find one next to you, recognizable by a "Charlie Sheen" bag full of coke (cola).

And if the first EP oscillated between echoes of Interpol (26/27), guitars à la Editors, and vocal interweavings drawn from At the Drive-in (Two Tone), this work, on the other hand, proves to be aggressively personal without being truly original: but which band could claim to be such today?
Here it is the lyrics, the narrative style, and the content that make the difference, thanks also to the force of a hurricane of more complex and layered sound interweavings than those heard in the first, Highly Arousing LP: BRUTALISM!
If I were you, by now I would have already stopped reading to rush into a record store, yes: no mp3, you have to listen to it loud and on vinyl, in pink, orange (2000 copies), or yellow limited to 300 copies!