Foals

‘Antidotes’

(Transgressive)

When The Fly caught up with Foals just before Christmas for January’s cover feature, frontman Yannis Phillipakis had something on his mind that he wanted to share with us. “You know that we’re gonna be on the cover of all these magazines?” he said. “Well, none of them have heard the album. What if they think it’s shit? They’re gonna look like dicks!” And, well, we couldn’t really argue with him. At the time that we and the rest of the

UK music press all dived headfirst up Arse Foals, no-one had heard the Foals album. It wasn’t finished and if it was shit then, well, most of the music press are dicks anyway so they’d be alright, but we’d have to join them.

But Yannis needn’t have worried – Foals’ album was never going to be a dud. Even when they got in sonic megalomaniac Dave Sitek as producer, or when reports came through that most of the songs featured a brass section, ‘Antidotes’ was always going to be great. And, mostly, it is. Their live shows may work perfectly as 45-minute adrenaline-OD’ing explosions, but ‘Antidotes’ is no live album, the songs working their magic a little more slowly and subtly than their bombastic live counterparts. The futuristic-ska stutter of ‘The French Open’ is a great opener, but it barely has a chance to finish before the militaristic stomp of ‘Cassius’ comes surging in. It’s an exhilarating new-wave art-punk groove where Sitek’s touch shines – the brass section sounds like they’re playing guitar parts – fucked-up and brilliant. The skyscraping euphoria of ‘Red Socks Pugie’ – the closest they get to a ballad – comes next, armed with a relentless, arena-ransacking chorus. It’s the album’s highlight, a stick-yer-mobile-in-the-air anthem for the post-Klaxons generation.

As first halves go, ‘Antidotes’ is up there with anything released in the past few years – the metallic, taut ‘Olympic Airways’ sounds like the sort of spiky anti-anthem that Bloc Party made before they went europop, whilst the malevolent, disco-punk fury that ends ‘Heavy Water’ is breathtaking. They can’t keep up the pace in the second half, though, with redux B-side ‘Big Big Love (Fig 2)’ needlessly fiddled with and closer ‘Tron’ never quite taking off in the manner its pulsing, wiry intro suggests.

So, it’s not flawless, and why should it be? ‘Antidotes’ is an ambitious, three parts great debut by a band who have made a point of cursing an industry that’s too quick to hype and even quicker to judge. This is a perfect indicator, pockmarks’n’all, of where Foals are right now. Crucially, and even more excitingly, it’s also a thrilling signpost to where they’re going.

Niall Doherty