Foals
Total Life Forever
Sub Pop, June 2010
Now here’s a weird one. Foals’ debut album serves a very specific purpose for me: Its standout tracks echo and enhance restless, caffeinated creativity. A breakneck pace provided by tight, crisp drumming; yelped vocals from singer Yannis Philippakis; repeated, high-pitched, distortionless eighth-note guitar riffs played with such precision you feel like the band’s multiple guitarists are hitting the strings with tiny glockenspiel mallets; unexpected saxophone bleats and blasts, strategically deployed…it’s the perfect accompaniment to when you’ve got so much energy your leg is twitching and it’s all you can do to to actually type instead of simply pounding on the keyboard, hoping to get your point across through sheer force of will. For me it’s that nervous urgency that separates Foals from the army of angular-guitar also-rans who’ve occupied UK indie for the past however many years. Songs like “Cassius,” “Red Socks Pugie,” “Olympic Airways,” and particularly “Balloons” have an originality of tone and force of execution that, for me anyway, makes them a lot more worth returning to than your average I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gang of Four product.
So what to make of a follow-up record where there’s pretty much none of that? I suppose that given the flack the band received for a) being late to the post-punk revival party, and b) earning, through simple instrumental proficiency and clarity, the “math-rock” sobriquet and all the approbation that comes with it despite being uniformly four-four, a change in direction was all but inevitable. And I suppose that since the band’s previous slow jams were more to be endured than enjoyed, there’s no way I’m going to connect with this less kinetic, more groove-oriented album the way I did with its predecessor.
But here’s the thing: What they’re doing here is less immediately useful to me, but it’s still interesting, simply because it’s so weird! Do you want to hear what post-punk Go-Go might sound like? Check out “Miami”! Do you want to hear skinny Englishmen funnel lyrics cribbed from the Lemonheads’ “Into Your Arms” into some weird Morris Day swing? Check out “Total Life Forever”! Do you want to hear a Discipline-era King Crimson take on Fleet Foxes? Check out “Blue Blood”! Most of the album is a fairly unremarkable attempt to create a sound as panoramic and pretty as Antidotes was mostly inward and aggressive–cf. lead single “Spanish Sahara”–but sprinkled throughout all that is such a strange set of vocal and musical approaches that I’m a bit dumbfounded. It left me feeling enough critical goodwill toward the band that they could throw in their most nakedly crowd-pleasing Bloc Party-type jam yet, “This Orient” (a big soaring chorus invoking “this Western feeling” and everything) and I end up really, really digging it instead of cringing.
I’d probably have preferred the band tighten up even further, damn the critical torpedoes and full speed ahead, emphasis on speed. And indeed this thing really could stand tightening up even if they are gonna move away from “Balloons.” But there’s a groovy weirdness in here I can get behind on the relatively rare occasions when it pops up, and I hope they double down on it next time around.