Seth Whippet - 20/03/07
You don't see this very often, even if New Rave is apparently sweeping the nation: a room full of people all going wild to the sounds of a band. Dancing because their minds have given their body no other choice on account of the frantic rhythms and intricate guitar-lines emanating from the PA. This is the effect Foals have on the audience, and your correspondent, and it feels nothing short of sensational.
"The best thing I've seen in a long time" is how I described it on the night, and that still rings true this morning. Their guitars might be worn unfeasibly high, but Foals rock harder than any band I've seen that tries their best to look cool. To put their music into some kind of context - that's what I'm here for, after all - it's probably best filed under the fictional 'math-disco' genre. Actually, throw something about techno in there and you're getting even closer to what this exciting new band sounds like.
Many of their inferior indie-dance peers think that beats and bleeps on their own are a substitute for anything approaching innovation (see: The Rapture or Radio 4's sophomore records), but Foals produce a heady, ambitious sonic mixture concocted by the same instruments (save for what I believe to be an analogue synth) that Razorlight use. Think about that for a second: Borrell and co cook up ready-meal indie for the younger generation of housewives, Foals melt minds with a deliciously organic dance-rock hor d'oeuvre prepared lovingly for those of a more eclectic persuasion.
So what do we know about Foals other than their live pedigree? Well, they're based in Oxford, they used to be called The Edmund Fitzgerald and they're releasing stuff on the uber-hip Transgressive Records. Though there's barely a chance of them crashing the top 40 and daytime Radio One a la label-mates The Young Knives, if you're looking for a band to go out and dance to it'd be churlish to look elsewhere.
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