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Cover of the new album by the Idles
Idles - "Ultra Mono"
They finish you off with their correctness!
At the beginning of every concert, Idles singer Joe Talbot goes from band member to band member and demonstratively kisses each of the boys on the mouth.
If too many men hold Ringelpiez pogo hands-on in front of the stage, Talbot sometimes calls out to the crowd: "If there aren't any women down there, it's not a circle, it's a phallus!"
Andreas Borcholte's playlist
Photo:
Christian O. Bruch / laif
Idles: Model Village
Black Heino: Homo economicus
Isolation Berlin: Tutto grigio
Cro: Endless Summer
Marie Davidson & L'Œil Nu: Worst Comes to Worst
Sufjan Stevens: Sugar
Fleet Foxes: Sunblind
Lia Lia: Night Call
Public Enemy: Fight The Power (Remix 2020)
Prince: I Need A Man (2020 Remaster)
Go to Spotify playlist Right arrow Go to Apple Music playlist Right arrow
Since their second album "Joy As An Act of Resistance" (2018) at the latest, the rock band from Bristol has been one of the most popular representatives of the rebounding hardcore genre.
They are loud, they have slogans and catchy hooks, are left-wing and feminist.
They wrote the hymn of solidarity ("Danny Nedelko") to a friend who was suffering from racism, and they met the obsession with beauty and the cult of the body with a stormy ode to self-love ("Television").
Love and compassion, no aggression, that's the band's creed.
For the video for their new single "A Hymn", they invited their parents into family carriages and drove them through the suburban dreariness of West England.
Never before in pop history have punk rockers been such model boys.
With "Ultra Mono", Idles now condense and professionalize sound and content.
The album should sound dry and reduced like an old school hip-hop album.
In order to achieve this sound that they had always wanted, they could hire Nick Cave producer Nick Launay, who
drove
out
any residual amateurish
fuzziness, but sharpened the band's rawness and passionate demeanor.
The effect is immediate.
"Wha-ching! That's the sound of the sword going in", Talbot crows at the beginning of the opening track "War": "Clack clack clack a clang clang! That's the sound of the gun going bang bang".
The guitar also makes noises that simulate falling combat bombers or alarm sirens.
The chorus is so agitated that you want to open the window and yell out.
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Idles
Ultra mono
Label: PARTISAN -PIAS
Release date: 09/25/2020
Medium: audio CD
Label: PARTISAN -PIAS
Release date: 09/25/2020
Medium: audio CD
approx. € 14.99
Price query time
09/25/2020 7:39 p.m.
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Against whom, against what?
Against warmongering, homophobia and racism, against ignorance and white supremacy and, of course, against the posh upper class, whose elite system keeps England's working class and precariat from advancement and prosperity ("Model Village", "Carcinogetic").
"I've got anxiety" is what Talbot declaims in one of the best pieces on the album, an impressive, oppressive echo of the Black Flag classic "Depression" from 1981. Oppressive also because the themes and the deranged states of mind from then and now even differ don't seem so different.
Neither in the US nor in the UK.
Psychotropic drugs, on the other hand, noisy idles like their genre ancestors, are not the solution either.
Heard on the radio
On Wednesdays at 11 p.m. there is a taped mixtape on the Hamburg web radio byteFM with many songs from the records discussed and highlights from Andreas Borcholte's personal playlist.
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However, the Zeitgeist parameters have changed.
Idles do away with toxic masculinity in "Ne Touche Pas Moi" and get help from the queer Savages singer Jehnny Beth.
"I raise my pink fist and say black is beautiful" postulates Talbot in Grounds and appeals to the community of all benevolent white breads with heavy beats.
Sure, the mallet-like style does too - or sometimes it looks awkward, as if the Sleaford mods were throwing cotton balls ("Mr. Motivator").
But the relentlessly beating piece, "Kill Them With Kindness", says it all: Friendliness is the greatest provocation that hardcore has to offer today.
Simple but disarming.
(9.0)
Listened briefly
Crucchi Gang - "Crucchi Gang"
Have you always wanted to hear Sven Regener sing "Weißes Papier" in Italian?
The amusing heart project of the Element of Crime boss, his wife Charlotte Goltermann and "Traduttore" Francesco Wilking, on which Sophie Hunger, Faber, Clueso and Isolation Berlin also transform their songs into Italo-Pop is understood as a declaration of love to Bella Italia.
Amore!
(7.8)
Public Enemy - "What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down?"
The hip-hop militia, which once called rap "black man's CNN", is throwing itself back into the fight against racism and the marginalization of Afro America. "State of the Union" grumbles and poisons against Trump, but with their old-man skepticism compared to the Internet, Twitter, TV and the like, Chuck D, 60, and Flavor Flav, 61, seem quite radically old school.
(6.0)
Marie Davidson & L'Œil Nu - "Renegade Breakdown"
In "Kotti Blues", Marie Davidson describes the Kottbusser Tor, Berlin's most popular focal point and fixed point, as the center of the world.
The French-Canadian knows her way around the clubs, she is a techno and electronic musician in demand worldwide - and explores her burnout experiences with a new band and a new chanson wave sound, which have already been discussed several times.
Hangover disco!
(7.9)
Black Heino - "People and Machines"
"A new being is spreading, the specter of uselessness," sings front fighter Diego Castro in the title song of the new, well-produced album by Black Heino, a kind of punk hybrid of Fehlfarben and The Jam: It's about the "Homo oeconomicus", the brave new world of work, the individual versus the "Alexa" collective and the class struggle.
So Marxism still rocks.
(8.0)