Valentine's Day may be over, but love is still in the air in the UK music industry.
Introduced by a killer debut single featuring the chorus "And you can hold me like he held her / And I will fuck you like nothing matters", The Last Dinner Party currently have the UK's number one album with the darkly romantic Prelude To Ecstasy. Today, February 16, Idles, a band best known for their savage dissection of societal ills, released their first album of love songs, TANGK, with combative frontman Joe Talbot telling anyone who'll listen that "Love is the fing." And tonight, Talbot's one-time collaborators Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes will feel the love of a hometown crowd once again when they close out their UK tour with the second of two sold-out shows at the iconic 3,300-capacity Roundhouse in Camden, north London, in support of their superb new Top 10 album Dark Rainbow.
Though it's not explicitly being marketed as such, Dark Rainbow too is an album of love songs. At one point during its creation, the collection bore the working title Self Love (also the title of its penultimate track), dealing as it does with trying to find one's authentic self amidst the white noise of modern life, shedding skin, casting aside old routines, making meaningful connections, and walking out of the darkness to give oneself - and others - permission to embrace the beauty and joy and wonder in life. Written down, that sounds simple and straightforward, but life is complex and humans are complicated, as Frank Carter knows as well as anyone.
