“Balloons”
from the album Antidotes
2008
iTunes
Foals make hard, trebly, uncomfortable, spiky, anxious, uptight, straining-to-be-different music, and for all that, it’s rather good. Fumes of energy and ambition roll off Antidotes, this Oxford band’s first album, though it’s important to say up front that depending on your nervous system — and your tolerance for English post-punk mannerism — you might find it grating. There’s a huge emphasis on upbeats, adenoidal chants, ropy or stabbing or twinkly guitar lines, tempos and arrangements that are claustrophobic and too fast, all for reasons of style.
The quintet’s album was produced by Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, and he used the studio. He made more of Foals than is naturally there. He added some horns, for one thing (by members of Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra), and brought echo and texture and atmosphere to a band whose sound is as narrow as a Giacometti sculpture. He expanded it, broadened it and — just slightly — cooled it out.
Antidotes is a record by arty young men of a certain place and time, but on the other hand it’s cleverly nonspecific; it keeps veering away from how you want to typify it. “Like Swimming,” an instrumental with a stomp rhythm, hand claps, and knots of high-pitched, twin-guitar lines, suddenly slides into digital noise before ending; in many songs, those light-gauge guitar melodies are fighting against the drummer’s hard, dance-floor thwack.
Those guitar patterns imply a fondness for Senegalese mbalax music, but then again Africanisms have been in all kinds of clever non-African music that Foals are no doubt aware of: Steve Reich’s work, and also the English post-punk bands of years ago, like the Slits and Pigbag. Some things are just in the air.