“It feels like Hall and Oates is playing in my heart / I loved my man from the very start / He turned forgiveness into an art / You’ll never tear us apart…I LOVE MY MAN!” That’s IDLES Joe Talbot on “Hall & Oates,” easily the punkest-sounding song on the band’s fifth album and the only one that would totally sound at home on the band’s first three releases. But its sentiment is totally in line with the rest of TANGK, an album of love songs that is their most nuanced, expansive record yet.
He’s in barking mode on “Hall & Oates,” but on most of the songs Talbot is singing — he’s a very capable, very emotive crooner — and the songs are tailored for this new melodicism. “The conclusion we’ve come to is that Joe’s a soul singer or a blues singer,” guitarist Mark Bowen told us. “What we had to do was learn a lot more about harmony, and melody in the songwriting” while still keeping what they call “violence,” the hard-edged, distorted, and warped side of the band.
It’s that mix of melody, menace and heart that is the key to TANGK, which may win over people who didn’t take to IDLES’ output through 2020’s Ultra Mono. Call it “Resistance as an Act of Joy,” this is their most accessible collection of songs to date, still with lots of bruising energy but also overflowing with heartfelt lyrics. The combo really works, and it’s probably no accident the album came out the same week as Valentine’s Day. IDLES hinted at this direction on 2021’s CRAWLER, a real chrysalis of album, but they emerge as a fully formed butterfly on TANGK. A Muhammed Ali type butterfly, mind you, that can still sting like a bee. Bowen co-produced the album with Kenny Beats, who worked CRAWLER, and Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich who encouraged the band to take things further outside their comfort zone.
“Grace” is definitely outside IDLES’ comfort zone, the closest they’ve come to straight-up pop. It sounds like a hit but also still sounds like them, with a lot of weird discordance bubbling just under the surface as Talbot gently sings “No god / No King / I said love is the thing.” (The song’s video, which repurposes Coldplay’s “Yellow” using deepfake tech, lets you know IDLES know what kind of song they’ve got.) Then there’s “Roy,” an old-fashioned rock n’ roll ballad where Joe belts out “Baby Baby Baby” as the guitars attack, decay and shred apart behind him. It’s as if his voice, his heart is making the walls crumble.
The best songs here are the ones that mix the band’s show-tested destroy-the-furniture energy with their new embrace of hooks and melody. “Gift Horse” is TANGK‘s pinnacle, an absolute stormer powered by a motorik freight train rhythm section (dig that liquid metal bassline) where Talbot pens more mash notes in the verses (“My steed sees how dreams are made / He’s my dream like I just got paid”), cranking the tension for its explosive “Look at him GOOOOOOOOOO” chorus that rockets things to the moon. Then there’s “Dancer,” which features backing vocals from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang and owes more than a little to their dance-rock style. At first blush, Talbot sounds very menacing till you realize he’s channeling Irving Berlin: “Dancers hip to hip, dancing cheek to cheek!”
Elsewhere: IDLES tip their hat to Bristol neighbors Portishead on the trip-hop-y “POP POP POP,” and soar on the stomping “Jungle” which has one of Talbot’s best vocal performances. Not everything totally works but there are no out-and-out clunkers and, at a lean 40 minutes, TANGK is exuberant and genuinely sweet; a wham-bam-thank-you-mam record that calls the next day. It’s unquestionably IDLES but you can bring this one home to your mother.