Antidotes - Foals Album Review

Foals

Album Review

‘Antidotes’ is the grandiose debut album by Oxford quintet Foals, who already exude the quintessence of the greats.

Musically, the band does not shy into your typical vox/guitars/bass/drums combo, but treads into electronica and brass territory which, telling by landmark tracks such as ‘Two Steps Twice’, ‘The French Open’, ‘Cassius’ and ‘Olympic Airways’, is set to become their original trademark. All songs proud themselves of riffs imprinted with the band’s greatly strong personality, and especially achieve momentum with the Bjorkesque intro beats on ‘Big Big Love’ and the exotic drumming on ‘Red Socks Pugie’.

Songs, the acoustic renditions of which would not lose an ounce of relevance and appeal would drums and guitars be replaced with kora and derbouka in an imagined MTV Unplugged session. Watch this space…

Until then, while lyrics are not immediately intelligible and them being available on the album sleeve is most welcome, you’ll dig Yannis Philippakis’ vocals which pertain of David Byrne, Kele Okereke and Billie Corgan’s best delivery.

In a time when finding rock music to actually dance to (as in dancing, not pogoing or re-enacting House of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’) is proving more and more difficult, it took five boys from Oxford, with decent musical culture, to bring back authentic groove to the surface.

Just like New Yorkers Yeasayer a wee bit before them, Foals are bringing tribal rock straight to your ear step , setting the trend for a more danceable rock sound and making evidence that Rock’n’Roll is more alive than ever, welcoming listeners from many breeds and creeds.

Talk about ‘Antidotes’ in this day and age of “indie” uniformity in the UK!

This is an album with undeniably great merit, making the band’s challenge to deliver an equally good second opus in the next couple of years even greater.

Solange Moffi