The death and future of punk, pt. 37, THE IDLES

The Idles are from Bristol. The one in England, not Connecticut. They’ve been plunkin’ about since 2012, but their first album was released this year. It’s called Brutalism. 

The cover features a photo of singer Joe Talbot’s mother, whom Talbot cared for in the last years of a long illness, mounted above a stark shrine constructed by Talbot and his father. These are placed in the corner of a bare room with brick floors and white painted brick and stone walls. It has the barren, but emotionally loaded austerity of Joseph Beuys work. It’s an eerily perfect image for an album entitled and themed around the notion of brutalism. 

Ever seen this movie called My Architect?

It’s about the architect Louis Kahn, revealed through the eyes of his sometimes estranged son, Nathaniel Kahn. It’s heartrending, as a dad and lad tale, in its austere, sadly masculine way. The younger Kahn, as a budding filmmaker, with a heavy, still hurting heart find the beauty in his father’s work. It’s also moving as a testament to Louis Kahn’s devotion to his work, even at the expense of his personal life, which for all its starkly 'brutal' qualities is somehow breathtaking, grand, even beautiful. 

Kahn’s work and Le Corbusier’s stand on the fringes of brutalism - at its worst typified by every butt ugly structure built in East Germany in the 1960s - but speak to its potential in first principles and basic materials. Conceived as a socialist aesthetic, a more honest antidote to the frilliness of Beaux Arts and other embellished 20th century styles, brutalism had both godawful and awesome products. 

What’s all this got to do with rock ’n’ roll. Well, Brutalism shares with its namesake a radical return to basics, to punk foundations. The Idles, being the smart lads down the pub, rather see their music, in its rhythmically forward and harmonically bereft directness as a musical bit of brutalism. And gosh, I get that. Their music is lean, mean and essential. Radical in the sense that it strips layers away; much of the album is taut, driven bass and drums powering Talbot’s vocals with harsh, jagged punctuations from the guitars of Keith Bowen and Lee Kiernan.

You’ll hear bits and pieces of other punk and post-punk inspirations, including the Fall and the Gang of Four. They also remind me a bit of this Aussie outfit called the Eddy Current Suppression Ring - they’re both party bands for ironists and malcontents. And singer Lou Talbot hasn’t fallen too far from the Rotten tree of songs like “Bodies.” 

“Well done” represents what the Idles do best, take the piss. Singer Lou Talbot has a go at dim peers, television presenters, and other irritants in a biting, but Pythonesque attack on well, BOURGEOIS EXPECTATIONS. For “Mother” Talbot rages over his late mother working and slaving her life away, “We Gotta Get Outta This Place” style. The b-part of the verse sneers “the way to scare a Tory is to read and get rich.” There you go.

“Stendhal Syndrome” mocks a thick sort of individual who scorns the works of Rothko and Basquiat as primitive and useless because they don’t ‘get’ them. “White privilege” is a direct commentary on exactly what the title suggests, while “Divide and Conquer,” a direct take on the destruction of the National Health Service in Britain.

Generally, as Talbot puts it, “they sing about the stuff they have bar conversations about. “ Along with Sleaford Mods and Fat White Family, the band is forging a punk sound for a new century, rooted in the primality of punk, but steeped in the staccato immediacy of rap.

Any style more than four decades along invariably becomes questioned for its continuing relevance. Invariably, but not necessarily intelligently. Me, I believe that punk lives. Funk lives. Jazz lives. Joyce lives. Godard lives. You live. Anything that ever awakened consciousness and brought release or joy lives. Brutalism is a powerful shot of punk in 2017. Trends and monitoring trends is for demographers and fools. 

P.S. - I was reading this future-now essay by Udo Gollub, the mucky-muck of something called Seventeen Minute Languages. The essay (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/must-read-article-how-our-lives-change-dramatically-20-delahunty) discusses all  of the commonplaces of life in the last century that will be going bye-bye soon. Nurses. Insurance. Automobiles. Jobs. If Gollub is right about even half of this shit, prepare for your head to spin. Universal everything, including health care and income, will be the only things that save us from the savagery of class war. In other words, one more time Socialism will be the only thing that saves Capitalism. But one thing that I know that will help us survive these psychic ravages is art, and some of that art will almost necessarily be brutal.