Foals: Antidotes

2008-03-19 17:29:53

After having waited to listen to this album for what seems like the longest year of my life, I can happily say that five boys from Brighton have finally given me a concrete reason to be obsessed with music again.
    
If you’ve not heard of this Brighton-based quintet before then listen up because Foals rightly deserve, and I am pretty certain will be successful in gaining, your complete and utter adoration.
    
Foals begin their campaign from the off. The album version of The French Open (my favourite track and one I’d previously only managed to claw a copy of as a demo) has matured and developed into a storming, full-scale assault on rhythm, rock and melody.
    
It’s bold, brassy and littered with more off-syncopated beats than you can shake a stick at. The vocals (“un peu/air sur la terre”) have also been developed into the full five-piece harmonic yells that make a live rendition so bloody amazing.
    
It’s followed by Cassius, a track which will surely manage to placate even the most disagreeable of hardcore fans in the glaring absence of last summer’s hit single Hummer. It’s even catchier and more dance-orientated than its predecessor and if there aren’t a million club remixes of this track by the end of the year then something, somewhere in the universal order, has gone very badly wrong.
    
Things get more experimental on Red Sock Pugie and Olympic Airways, to a level that approaches near-brilliance. The stripped-down drum samples of the former and stunning guitar-led melodies of the latter reveal Foals’ talent for producing truly organic dance tracks.
    
Balloons (the only former single to have made it to the album) fits in with the rest of the soundscape immaculately, it’s harmonised yells and shattering cymbals becoming something of near-addiction. By the time the multiple polyrhythmic build-ups of Two Steps, Twice kick in, Antidotes should have cemented itself in your tiny little brain, refusing to budge until it’s been exposed to something of equal magnificence.
    
And it’ll have a damn hard job trying to top this. Foals have not only proved (if they ever needed to) that a band who have played an endless array of anonymous house parties over the past few years can teach the rest of us a thing or two about modern music, they’ve produced an album that, complete with all it’s multi-rhythmic layering and cross-genre appeal, should be first over the winning line at year’s Mercury Music Prize. Who needs Oxbridge now?
    
Review: Michelle Dhillon
    

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