Album Review: IDLES - Ultra Mono

I can't imagine anyone less qualified to discuss this album. Promising start to a review, I know, but IDLES are a band I've always been a little hesitant to approach. Bursting onto the scene in 2017 with the critically acclaimed 'Brutalism' before following it up in 2018 with the equally adored 'Joy As An Act Of Resistance', the British punk-rockers have amassed a reasonable following. The reason I've only been on the periphery of this group is that I've always had certain reservations about punk as a genre. I've liked pop-punk in the past that's less viscerally intense, but more flowery and melodic. IDLES, on the other hands, seemed to me to be the embodiment of the total opposite. Then again, this is a group so well liked in their genre that I thought their latest album 'Ultra Mono' could be a decent entry point for me in terms of getting into the genre a little more. After all, Spanish Love Songs released some of my favourite music of the year so far, and that bordered on punk. There's no reason IDLES couldn't do the same, right?

As it turns out, however much 'Ultra Mono' is a good album, what it isn't is a consistent or even one, not quite living up to the hype whilst still being very solid. And the reasons for this are almost too easy to explain and it has to do with the production and the bands tendency to default to these tired, drudging grooves that are not interesting at best and headache educing at worst on 'Kill Them With Kindness' and 'The Lover', two songs that hardly have any hook to them at all. It can kind of work when the tempo is amped up and the drum work is a little faster and more developed like on 'Model Village', song with a killer hook. When the melodies actually coalesce into something beyond meandering punk nonsense a majority of these songs do work. Take the killer bass lines on 'Mr Motivator' and especially 'Carcinogenic' which lend these songs a pounding energy whist persevering the melody. The manic fury of the two openers 'War' and 'Grounds' also elevates them above most of what else is here, but on the other end of the spectrum you've got 'A Hymn', a simmering slow-burn ballad where I was waiting for the moment where it would explode into life with some kind of crescendo which unfortunately never came. When this album works, it really works. When it doesn't, it just makes my head hurt.

And I could say a lot of the same about the songwriting here too. IDLES certainly have a way with words when it comes to their political cuts. There's a ruthless, aggressive, declarative tone to the lyrics, both in how the band expresses their politics on 'Grounds', 'Model Village' and 'Carcinogenic', and how they address the haters, with Joe Talbot straight up telling the haters to eat shit on 'The Lover'. In other words, there's nothing close to subtlety in the writing here, and, in many ways, that can work, especially for the more political tracks here. 'Grounds' is a furious call to arms for people to stop bitching about what offends them and actually strive for things to get better in the future, a song that rings eerily true in today's cultural climate where social media has enabled 'cancel culture'. On 'Model Village' the titular setting is painted with uncompromising honesty and rage as it's revealed that what might initially appear to be an ideal place to live has a much darker side shrouded in a far right political agenda, with 'Carcinogenic' highlighting how if we let these ideas continue to affect society in the coming years, nothing is likely to change for the better.

Unfortunately, not every song has that same cutting power. 'Mr Motivator' and 'Anxiety' might have decent hooks, but the lyrics of either song feel completely indistinct. Then you have the songs that just feel like underwritten fragments like 'Ne Touche Pas Moi' and 'Reigns', where the music alone is not enough to carry them. They are the minority of songs here, but there is enough of them to make the album feel like a compromised experience overall.

'Ultra Mono' is an easy album to like, but a hard one to love. A few standout songs compromised by others that feel sluggishly produced or too underwritten to connect fully. Do check it out because, for the good songs alone, I think you'd find it a worthwhile experience.

3.5 / 5

Best Songs: 'War', 'Grounds', 'Model Village', 'Carcinogenic', 'Danke'

Worst Songs: 'Kill Them With Kindness'