Idles: Tangk review – the Bristol firebrands change tack – with an album of love songs

(Partisan)
There’s less seething, more singing as the band’s fifth album finds them evolving musically, artistically and emotionally

Idles’ fifth album starts with an arpeggiating piano and ends on a short, unshowy sax solo. One bouncing track, Dancer, is about the pleasure of bodies moving “cheek to cheek” and “hip to hip”; it features backing vocals by James Murphy and Nancy Whang from club-rock deities LCD Soundsystem. Another Tangk high point, the slow-burning Grace, imports the pensive synth reverberations of LCD’s track Someone Great.

Given that Idles’ pulverising first three LPs were fuelled by terse menace and guitar firepower, a major shift is clearly under way. This was a Bristol band who made their name taking down xenophobia and toxic masculinity with righteous, punk-adjacent aggro, one whose attention to musical detail always elevated them beyond the genre’s riffy indignation. Now they appear to be pupating into something else again: a rock band aiming for expansion even as they pursue more nuance.