Foals
Transgressive
I cannot think of a single original thing that has been said about Foals in the last six months. Do you know how hard this makes what I have to do? Doubly hard, twice. That’s how hard. Because first I have to condemn everyone for not saying anything original and then I actually have to justify my moral rectitude by bringing a palate-cleansing course of fresh thought following the cloying banquet of derivative tripe.
So much coverage, so many voices – a diaspora! …of, um, the young middle class across England AND America! – saying the same complimentary things in the same complimentary way, but never quite getting the music, the band, the buzz. The world inevitably tends towards eating itself; coverage of buzz bands implodes under the burdensome litany of qualifications about just how hyped a band are – focus on buzz and the music is obscured. This is the fucking awful self-obsession of the rock-critically correct and it is borne of a lack of inspiration or imagination. It’s a goddam shame: a record as oft-times breathtaking as this should inspire everyone to strive for more fitting forms of expression.
Somewhat amusingly, as this self-obsessive buzz intensifies, enveloping and obscuring the music, Foals’ strength as artists resides in their intense disregard for all except the music they are playing. Nobody would come off well beneath the glare cast on them and they’ve regularly been guilty of some ungainly, self-aware squirming in interviews; when they play, though, there is nothing else in the world to them. This is the most you can ask of performers in the art-form noted above all others for its sublimity.
Antidotes is an egalitarian dialogue between its players, its muses, influences, between harmony and discord – balance achieved by recognising extremity and disagreement. They told me when interviewed, “Sitek said, you can go to some in producer and he’ll make you a pink brick. Compressed to fuck. He showed us the spaces between sounds.” Their immersion in the music they’re making, their trek to some half-imagined source, has left them so familiar with the terrain en route that listening to this record is to hear their descriptions of its pieces: musical landscapes in narratives incredibly engrossing, yes, and also guilty of the flaws specific to those who tell it – and so more personal, and so the better.
Ahh… fuck. That over-reaches, doesn’t it? As time passes, y’see, and you grow more familiar with it, Antidotes offers many minor epiphanies of appreciation: for the players and its emotion, but above all for its intelligence. This all comes later, fortunately; at first you hear nothing but the record’s pulse, lusty affirmation that it and you are alive. You’re completely over-run; the opening does it: the staggering one-two hit of ‘The French Open’ and ‘Cassius’, a violent reprisal upon doubters, pounding, insistent and dramatic – you feel floored and breathless as the spiders-on-ice skitter of Yannis’ guitar gives way suddenly and a brass breakdown marking the scene change and second act. You’re grateful they offer the respite.
Those physical and emotional responses, though, are telling of the thought evident in sequencing, the artful production – signs of a band interested in more than being interesting. The record feels as though it’s in several movements: following the thrilling opening, the subsequent triumvirate of more considered and adventurous tracks make something of those abstruse influences everyone is so keen on talking about, particularly the BLN minimal shit; ‘Olympic Airways’, particularly, is curious in its refusal to offer the expected pummelling by drums while guitars are more tender, less crawling. A later movement, ‘Two Steps, Twice’ and ‘Big Big Love (Fig. 2)’, offers in turn both fury and insecurity; this combination is the showpiece of the album, yet also its heart and humanity: a rebuke and a caress genuinely meant, and which you can tell makes them anxious about how honest they’ve just been.
Fie on this earnesty! (Theirs and mine). ...As a friend objected, “But they’re not funny, are they? They’re not taking the piss out of me while I listen to them, or out of music or musicians.” He’s right. They’re not. This is neither a giddy nor a gleeful experience; but it’s fucking intoxicating: a throw-down record; at times, an imperative to dance as an antidote to rising nausea; but mostly, there’s just imperative – caused by Antidotes’ insistent, propulsive nature, there’s this physical imperative which circumvents any response other than what feels right viscerally.
The album is bigger than that single response, by far, but the physical response is at its core: the first reaction and the right one. Those minor epiphanies – the way Sitek’s production has Antibalas’ horns warmly embrace the abrasive edges of the guitar in ‘Heavy Water’s peaks, the deflated theatrics that close Electric Bloom with it’s refusal to peak in the way it’s earlier urgency portends – such small revelations and hidden joys come from deferred appreciation that behind something so visceral is art, craft and thought from immersed and obsessive musicians. Nonetheless, Antidotes is very much a record Foals have wrought; it is very much a debut record: obsessed over by the artists, struggled with, immersed in; perhaps too taut, too tight.
Certain records in certain publications demand big reviews. The match of Foals and Notion is not that of Klaxons and NME, Pitchfork and Radiohead. To me, though, Antidotes feels like that big record expecting a big review. It seems like there’s a lot to cover, too many edifices built up around it to navigate, too much said by too many and all too familiar: how Sitek produced it, how his mix was rumoured to be an awful stoned haze, that Yannis saved it, the covers, the influences. That rising buzz.
Y’know what buzz is, really? It’s the noise we raise in fear of the silence, our anxious confrontation with absence and anticipation; it’s the clamour we make in terrified stupor before the music arrives. Antidotes is out now. Words: Michael Lewin
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