Total Life Forever

For better and for worse, Foals’ debut Antidotes is a record of youthful energy. Whether you find the likes of “Cassius” and “Balloons” annoying or twitchily captivating, you can’t deny the restless exuberance that courses through them. Even when the band slowed down a bit on “Olympic Airways” and the stellar “Big Big Love (Fig. 2)”, the music still seemed a little frantic. Antidotes was promising, but it hasn’t aged terribly well. Now, by the time you get half way through the video for “Cassius”, it seems a bit tiresome as well as tiring.

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Within the first seconds of Total Life Forever opener "Blue Blood", it becomes clear that Foals have taken a leap. Front and center, between tick-tocking guitars, frontman Yannis Philippakis begins to sing. When Foals' debut, Antidotes, sent the UK press into hyperbolic fits three years ago, Philippakis boasted what Pitchfork's Tom Ewing perfectly described as a "blank bark"-- one faceless particle amidst many mathematically arranged dance-punk el ements. Philippakis was often indecipherable in a way that encapsulated those problems Foals' music suffered from as a whole: Their songs were fussy, calculating, and impenetrable, despite a ton of hooks. They could knock you down and they could make you glitch out, but finding an emotional connection was a challenge. In Total Life Forever, the Oxford quintet have not only opened up themselves and their sound, they've done so without abandoning the path that put them on the tips of tongues from the beginning.

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Since the moment they uploaded a bold draft of first single 'Hummer' to their MySpace page almost four years ago, Oxford five-piece Foals have boasted an extraordinary confidence. From discharging Dave Sitek as producer of their first album, Antidotes, to frontman Yannis Philippakkis' Angry Young Man-esque onstage swagger, they have insisted on doing things in an 'our way or no way' style. But their instant endorsement by the yooth music media worked both to their advantage and detriment – at the same time as teenagers up and down the country were scrambling to book them for their famed houseparties, an equal number of jaundiced critics were dismissing them as a flash in the pan, as yet another angular-soun ding band of haircuts with arty pretensions. And, in planning their second album, Yannis, Ed, Jack, Jimmy and Walter have been a long time absent from the current scene, which changes with the tide – something sceptics who've got them down as a 'fashion' band would think unwise.

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Always masters of a deft meshing of disco with post-punk, Oxford, England’s Foals return with their first full-length follow-up to 2008’s intriguingly-artworked Antidotes. Like their previous release, Total Life Forever alternates between keeping it guitar- and keyboard-centric and wandering off into drum-and-bass or strange electronica. Antidotes kept the dance beat pumping, sometimes to a fault, and Total Life Forever follows its throbbing example, for the most part. Fortunately, the band of Brits have developed in the interim a good ear for break-taking, like during the handclap B-section in the title track or the industrial percussion interlude in “Alabaster.”

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