#365songs (155 / 365)

My favorite song by a very wide margin off the one IDLES album I've heard, though the whole album is decent. My notion of IDLES is that they are a noisy yelly loud band whose lead singer has healthy notions about masculinity and vulnerability that he can maybe be a little didactic and over-earnest about. I mention all this because I think "The Beachland Ballroom" is the kind of song that comes out of that set of conditions when the stars align. This is a soul song about recovering from trauma that features that features Joe Talbot doing his best approximation of crooning in the first half. After the breakdown, it keeps its core but also becomes something else entirely: the repeated throat-shredding vocal hook of "DAMAGE! DAMAGE!!! DAMAGE!!!!!" is one of the more thrilling moments in my music collection every one of the five times it's repeated. If I have any quibble about this song it's that, while I hate a fadeout as much as anyone, it could stand to have a little longer of a comedown after hitting us with the album's high point like that.