At this point, it’s no secret that Idles are one of the most captivating live acts on the planet. They’re also fast becoming one of the most prolific, having released their fourth album Crawler a little more than a year after their third, Ultra Mono. The albums are quite different in subject matter: the latter is a distinctly political affair, whereas the former plunges back into singer Joe Talbot’s introspective side as he did across their debut, Brutalism. That record and Crawler, then, form a kind of thematic parenthesis structure around Ultra Mono and their sophomore effort, Joy as An Act of Resistance.
For its part, Crawler begins more grimly than any Idles record prior. Talbot states that he feels cold on ‘MT 420 RR’, and the departure from his typically-fierce delivery sells it – he sounds like he’s bundled up, arms at his sides, speech muffled by an unkempt beard. It’s the story of a motor vehicle accident in which he was involved, compounded into a cautionary parable about Talbot’s own flirtations with death. He describes the sight of a dangerously-fast cyclist who crashes gruesomely. Whereas Brutalism ended with its slowest, most somber offering, here the record begins at a low and builds itself back up from there, all the way to ‘The End’ where Talbot triumphantly comes to declare “in spite of it all / life is beautiful”.
Performing live in Boston, Talbot and his four bandmates are at the very end of their US tour – this is the last headlining date, their only remaining engagement being a festival in New Jersey. The set begins like most Idles sets have since the Joy era, with the slow burn of ‘Colossus’. Bassist Adam Devonshire sets the tempo as the band gets situated under low red lighting. Talbot walks the stage from end to end, finally coming to rest with a foot on the riser of drummer Jon Beavis, who has since joined in the escalation. After the foreboding first verses, the crowd is already fully in accompaniment mode, and the room positively explodes. Guitarist Lee Kiernan’s long hair goes up in circles around his head as he whips about, often on tiptoes. His counterpart Mark Bowen does the same, moving his guitar as if he were hacking through some dense layer of vines in front of him. Many of Idles’ songs hinge on the pounding repetition of a keyword or phrase, and the foreboding “IT’S COMING” that has made this song an eternally-viable opener is the first of many for the night.
After ‘Colossus’, the house lights come up and Talbot rests his right foot on one of the center monitors and looks out into the crowd, bidding them to separate in two. The packed room somehow manages the task, compressing everyone along the edges. “Are you ready to collide?” he bellows, and the room folds in on itself while the band begins ‘Car Crash’. More sprechstimme than singing, it moves with an almost hip-hop-like cadence, lyrically exploring the abruptness with which circumstances can shift. Equally intense but more exuberant in tone is ‘Mr. Motivator’, a collage of truly unprecedented imagery that, as one of the earliest singles from Ultra Mono, drove anticipation for that album ably. ‘Grounds’ is led by an electronic riff – something still relatively recent as a prominent piece of the Idles soundscape. It appears and recedes briefly like the line on a heartbeat monitor, and later in the song features a strangely-concocted rush that sounds like an orchestra reverberating through layers of sheet metal.
Following that, Talbot has more words for the crowd, this time gratitude rather than instruction. Always ones for opening their hearts to their audiences, he talks for a moment about how valuable it is for them to feel safe and welcomed as they go across this foreign continent on tour. “We hope we make you feel as good as you do us,” he says and nods his head as the crowd cheers. He also has some interesting news: “This is our last Idles show for a long time… We’re going away to write,” explains Talbot – the band evidently have amassed enough ideas for a fifth record, which was hardly a given just yet considering the pace they’ve kept over the past few years; but Boston has been clued in that 2023 may very well see the next release from Idles.
In ‘The Beachland Ballroom’, Talbot reaches the point in the album and sets where he begins to unpack the inspiration behind Crawler’s title. “If you see me down on my knees / please do not think that I pray” – he looks back upon being humbled to the floor, not in search of answers, but from trauma. In the refrain, the only word he can summon is “DAMAGE!” repeated over and over again like a hammer, somehow singing in all caps. At its core ‘Beachland’ is a soul song, ornate pianos leading into a supremely satisfying crescendo. The band have expressed a desire to explore this sound before, having covered Solomon Burke’s ‘Cry to Me’ on Joy. ‘Crawl!’ is just as passionate but a bit more philosophical, a tale of rising by millimeters from one’s worst point, accepting the necessity of the pain and difficulty while still finding the strength to throw one’s whole weight behind it. Sometimes it’s necessary to insist, “God damn I’m feeling good!” – even if you have to fake it at first because you so desperately need to make it.
The band also calls back to one of their first explorations of depression with ‘1049 Gotho’, and then dives into one of the deepest songs of the record, ‘The Wheel’. It’s Talbot’s personal story of generational, cyclic trauma, tracing to its root his experience with his mother’s alcoholism, which would come to define his own struggle that he’s been consistently open about in interviews and songs. The singular guitar downstroke that soundtracks the chorus of the song conjures an image of a withered hand descending down to spin the Wheel of Fortune with merciless vigor.
The defiant ‘Television’ finds Talbot picking up Bowen’s guitar and Bowen singing little snippets with just a microphone. Next, ‘A Hymn’ slows down to witness the most restrained the band has been since the intro of ‘Colossus’ – a cadre of exhausted crowd-surfers and moshers take a moment to rest the bodies they’ve been colliding with each other and/or lifting into the air all night, leaning for respite against Roadrunner’s various railings. This lull is a moment in which to explore shame, repeated as a line unto itself, like “damage” from earlier. The song ends fading into a slow clap in time with Beavis’ drums, but that very quickly transforms into the white-hot fury of ‘War’. Perhaps the best cut from Ultra Mono, somehow Bowen and Kiernan strung together enough effects to make their guitars sound like sirens ringing over the engines of jet planes as they dive to attack, huge and unrelenting. Just as forceful is the following ‘Wizz’ – a scant interlude off Crawler. Maybe the only complaint to levy with the song is that it’s too short, considering it so heavily suggests that Idles would find sure footing well into the realm of this unhinged, nearly-improvisational strand of hardcore. At its conclusion, someone sings exactly one line from Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’ – for a reason that remains unclear.
“Any scumbags in the audience?” Talbot asks, signaling what’s next. ‘I’m Scum’ has endured as one of their most effective anthems, embracing the so-called critiques of working-class life from without and whipping them into a cheer that could resound through any crowd of compassionately-minded people. During the song, Kiernan climbs down into the audience, while Talbot sits on the floor instructing everyone to get low to the ground as Kiernan does the same in the midst of the throng. At one point the side of the room to Talbot’s right starts to rise a bit too early and with comedic urgency, he beckons them back down. This ritual has long been a part of Idles live shows, in the early days often done during ‘Exeter’ from Brutalism. But it’s come to suit ‘I’m Scum’ just as well, and the crowd lifts Kiernan up when the song resumes and carries him back toward the stage, still playing his guitar.
Closing in on the end of the evening, and the end of a long tour, Idles keep their collective foot down on the gas pedal. Next comes ‘Danny Nedelko’, named for the singer of Heavy Lungs, and Talbot dedicates the song to the immigrants who have made and will make, the past, present, and future of the US and UK so much better. It’s Bowen’s turn to enter the fray this time, climbing his way out and standing up tall as crowd-surfers sail in the opposite direction just feet to the side. He too ripples back to the stage, and the final pause of the evening has arrived. Talbot speaks to the crowd once more: “Thank you very much for carrying us the past twelve years of our lives,” he says, a choice of phrasing apt both for the ravenous support Idles has found across the globe, as well as the much more literal assurance that neither of his guitarists gets lost to the mosh pit. “If I die tomorrow, I die grateful.” On this penultimate show for an indeterminate amount of time, the sentiment hits home even more than it already would have.
Of their final song, he declares: “This is an antifascist song, for anti-fascist folk. You’ve been perfect, and we’ve been Idles.” They close, also in keeping with their tradition, with ‘Rottweiler’, and in its lengthy outro, Talbot walks back to drum with Beavis while the others take the center of the stage. They draw out the final jam as long as they possibly can, as if they’re not quite ready for this cycle to end, always adding on one more note. It’s a testament to the love that the band feels for the community that they have built – and that has built itself – around their music. Idles have never lacked for sincerity, and both in the lyrics of their songs and in the moments when Talbot speaks plainly to the crowd, you can feel in every syllable the weight of that truth; the created, shared meaning that has pulled the band, its members, and its listeners out of untold depths to collide joyously with each other in the night.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
