Foals: Antidotes
Friday, 21 Mar 2008 16:18
Foals release their eagerly-awaited debut - one of the sounds of 2008?
Transgressive Records, out March 24th.
In a nutshell...
Pretentious, catchy, minimalistic.
What's it all about?
Antidotes is the debut album from five Oxford-based self-styled non-conformists. Electric guitar loops, brass instrument interludes, energetic beats and disengaged vocals run through the album's 11 tracks. Shades of indie, electric, dance and everything else are present. The lyrics are abstract and the melodic themes build slowly toward their (anti)climax. Choruses are often absent from Antidotes.
Who's it by?
A critical buzz has developed around Foals after TV appearances (Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Jools Holland), leaked tracks on the internet and collaboration with Brooklyn-based David Sitek, the man behind TV on the Radio. The sense of excitement has been generated as much by their image as by the music: frontman Yannis Philippakis is an Oxford University drop-out and has already set out his stall with impetuously-indie remarks about pop culture. Foals grew out of math-rock outfit Edmund Fitzgerald and Yannis now claims that the band look to feast like vultures on a range of moribund genres and sound, regurgitating them into something fiercely new.
As an example...
"Cassius it's over, Cassius away/Cassius these daydreams, these daydreams okay." - Cassius
"This is how we build a place, an aviary for today/Let's disappear till tomorrow." – Olympic Airways
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
Official honours already seem written on the wall, but Foals' sound is divisive and abstract enough to risk alienating its listeners. The powers that be will love it or hate it.
What the others say
"Antidotes is an explosion of colour and one of the most astonishingly original records of the past decade. It is a patchwork of influences… all woven together with a pop sensibility and a desire to defy the restraining influence of the mainstream." – Independent
"They're not the revolutionaries they've been painted as by know-nothing blabbermouths with too many hands in industry pockets to ever open an album worth its recording budget." – Drowned in Sound
So is it any good?
Comparisons have been drawn to Bloc Party, the Klaxons and even Oxford predecessors Radiohead, but Foals' debut seems like a more negative project.
The greatest achievement of Antidotes is a sense of renewal as the bare bones of a melody is passed clinically but skilfully between instruments. New layers are continually introduced as the band draws out a motif to its very limit, before saving songs from the oblivion of monotony through new injections of energy, courtesy of light drumming and afrobeats (Heavy Water), clean and breezy electric loops, punchy brass interludes (French Open) and even hand clapping (Like Swimming).
But is the constant interchange really an end in itself? Or does it expose a band too stubbornly indie to commit to anything worthwhile? Antidotes is a scientifically-mastered compendium of sounds – and the end result is a disjointed listen.
The energy that is created by the layering of successive shades of sound is in turn sapped out of the album by zombie-like distant vocals that are more abrasive than provocative. Lyrics confine themselves to the indifference of repeated buzzwords and concepts as wilfully abstract as "Cassius", "It's just another hospital" and "An aviary for today".
The most memorable songs may be Balloons and Heavy Water, where the vocal melody and the electric jingle accompanying it are boldly independent, yet seem to say something about each other. The passage through a range of rhythms and sounds in the better songs seems to be leading somewhere, rather than touching every musical base just to show that it can be done.
4/10
Nick Jacobs
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