Best of 2007 | Crazy Horses: NG Magazine Reviews Foals

2008-01-02 08:19:13

During our chat with Foals frontman Yannis earlier, I said that I’d been wowed by their performance at this year’s Dot to Dot festival in Nottingham during May 2007. He looked genuinely surprised and pleased at my enthusiasm. I didn’t quite get around to admitting that I’d literally been counting down the days until I would get to see the electric joy of Foals again, but I’m sure he saw the fire dancing in my eyes.
    
Having said this, there had been a niggling doubt in my mind about tonight. I was a bit worried that I’d be bitterly disappointed after building them up for the best part of six months. Had they really been as good as I’d kept raving to anyone who would listen at Rock City in May? Sadly for them, their set fanned the flames of my obsession further. Oh, dear Lord. Please don’t let me become a stalker. Or worse, a groupie. Eeeeeeuch!
    
Introduced by Yannis as ‘a song about the fall of the Roman empire’, Foals drag us into the unbridled energy of my favourite track, The French Open. The five-piece stand around the stage in a horseshoe shape that begins and ends with guitarists Yannis and Jimmy facing each other and fiercely kick and jolt about the stage as they play like they’ve just been let out of a stable. Even though the crowd isn’t overly familiar with the song, they’re immediately spurned into action and heads start eagerly bouncing around in the first few rows.
    
The track builds and builds, with drums getting faster and bass and guitars getting ever more intricate and intense until the track suddenly explodes into a frenetic polyrhythmic sound, crashing into your consciousness and knocking you into realisation that this is the UK’s most exciting and innovative band right now and you’re witnessing them live. You lucky, lucky b******.
    
Mathletics inspires pure insanity in the room. One guy tries to crowdsurf but fails and falls into the middle of the crowd. Drinks start flying (much to the chagrin of the solitary bouncer wandering around the makeshift pit like a caged bear), everyone north of the bar starts moshing about ferociously and Yannis and Jimmy bait the action by walking on the very edge of the stage, into the pit and up and down the stairs while still miraculously managing to play their guitars with awe-inspiring deftness and precision.
    
They continue into Two Steps Twice. Barely bothering to stop playing, Foals’ sets are akin to experiencing one pure, unadulterated, adrenalin rush. It’s so vital, so important and so goddamned refreshing to hear music played like this. Foals don’t just rip up the rulebooks; they incinerate them into a million smithereens before relentlessly trampling on the smouldering ashes of genre-specific music. And boy, does it kick ass.
    
Rounding things off with their immense breakthrough track Hummer, the room explodes once again. Jack’s layered start-stop, crash-bang-tsk drumming incessantly pokes away at the interweaving fretwork of Yannis’s and Jimmy’s guitars and Walter’s upfront and dynamic bass rhythms shred into the perfectly segmented pattern of Edwin’s keyboards.
    
Their performance was a mere thirty minutes long, but it was the stuff that dreams are made of. In fact, tonight’s spectacular set only serves to confirm the sheer genius of Foals: these boys hold the future of music in the palms of their hands, cradling it like a newborn child or, maybe in Yannis’ case, a delicately flowering rosebud (see our interview on NG Magazine tomorrow). If only they knew it. As a gruff-voiced Mr T might have said in some surreal episode of The A Team, I pity the foal that hasn’t seen this band live. Fnar.
    
Horsing Around: Michelle Dhillon
    
Images: Luke Sprague
    
*****NG Magazine's Best of 2007 series - Go to the Blog to find out more*****
    

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