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Idles: Tangk review – a return to joy as an act of resistance

It doesn’t all work, but there are plenty of smart, intriguing ideas as Idles prove they don’t just do howling fury

But context is everything, and this is Idles we’re taking about: authors of I’m Scum, Rottweiler, White Privilege and Never Fight a Man With a Perm, they of the guitarist given to performing onstage clad only in a pair of Y-fronts, who rose to fame on the back of debut album Brutalism, essentially a 41-minute long howl of grief and confusion at the death of Talbot’s mother and fury at the state of the UK. That was an album which seemed to push Idles’ initial approach as far as it could go: everything cranked up to 11, the desire to create a sense of cathartic communal rage tipping over into broad-brushstrokes rabble-rousing (after much online controversy, the band no longer perform its single Model Village, deeming its depiction of small-town life a little sweeping and condescending). Or perhaps it says something about underestimating Idles themselves, who in fairness, always seemed as likely to collapse under the weight of the contradictions at their centre as to develop; making muscular, aggressive music about “impotent male rage”, as Talbot put it, is a tough balancing act, liable to tip over, open to misinterpretation.

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