Idles – A Beautiful Thing: IDLES Live at Le Bataclan Review

A punk outfit with rage burning in their heart is one thing but Idles feels neutered in their recent releases. They have replaced anger with adoration. Their swing into loving thy neighbour instead of curb-stomping them is a fascinating change of pace and a risky move for Joe Talbot and company. But bold moves are the making of bands like Idles, whose earliest EP releases, like Welcome, relied on the dives into the unknown. Fearsome tactics like this are less used now the band is settled but pieces like A Beautiful Thing: Idles Live at Le Bataclan put their messages into the right hands. Idles is still a motion and force for brutal good – even if their recent comments and flirtations with artificial intelligence feel opposed to the grassroots venues which moulded their foundations. Still, they pay tribute to those early years in this stacked live album.  

Eighty minutes of their biggest and baddest tracks (pre-Tangk, that is). Idles lost their way on Ultra Mono and Crawler. Their attempt to stabilise on this live album hears them shuffle their strongest hits, mixing in slack songs from a period of middling work. It’s solid stuff overall. Colossus is given a stripped-back feel, a slower march to the poison-tipped point it still has. A Beautiful Thing soon finds itself boiling over with the communal rage heard between Talbot and the audience. For those unsure about Talbot as a frontman, the conviction he brings throughout this will convince. Never Fight A Man With A Perm suffers the same botched-sounding mix as the Colossus opener. It has the right energy to it and an outrageous collection of instrumentals which do not fit together. This is the mixing at fault, not the performance itself. A true hit like Mother sounds mangled.  

A Beautiful Thing fails to capture the joy of an Idles performance. With the shortcomings laid out here comes a disappointment not in the band but in the failure to capture a specific tone. Their energy is hard to bottle yet they have succeeded, impressively so, on three of their studio albums. Whether it is the Le Bataclan acoustics or the mixing after the show is unknowable. Idles and the crowd are in form and it makes for some excellent performances of I’m Scum and a ten-minute wonder on album closer Rottweiler. Great and Love Song do well to gain momentum, but all is lost in the mix. Maybe it isn’t the mix. Maybe it’s the tinnitus picked up from those late nights listening to Idles getting piped through loudspeakers. Whatever the case, Live at Le Bataclan is the chance to do something wild.  

But there is a general lack of energy despite the harshness and intensity whirring away. White Privilege marks a solid performance and a wonderful bit of Talbot’s audience work. France and the UK. Psychopaths at the top and terror at the bottom. Gram Rock does well to capture those painful realisations and makes good on a ripping live bit of fun. The latter half of A Beautiful Thing picks up the pace, but the niggling issues of the early tracks still linger. Solid work overall as is expected of Idles. They are naturals of the stage and as much can be heard on A Beautiful Thing. Yet something is lacking. Talbot and the band are in fine form but the punch of the clips seen on social media, uploaded to YouTube or circled in group chats is lacking. There is a lifelessness to it which comes from poor production.

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