Foals – Antidotes (Subpop)

Dance Rock is nothing new. A few years ago we were immersed in Neo-Wave bands like The Bravery and The Killers to try and get the MTV kids off the radio and onto the dance floor. But we ended up with an overabundance of front men with Billie Joe Armstrong eye makeup and identical musical catalogs. Yes, music is cyclical, but for a band to avoid being just a sound-alike they not only have to bring about the cycle, but also try to reinvent it.

Foals, the 5-piece dance-rock outfit from Oxford, England are such re-inventors. Equal parts post-punk and math-rock, Foals has as much owed to The Rapture as they do Gang of Four or The Clash. How can you describe Foals? It’s like stripped down Dance-Rock reading Dostoevsky, or a first-edition of some other hard cover. It’s an intellectual’s Dance-Punk that has you tapping your feet while you contemplate the lyrics. It’s elements like these that has lead singer Yannis Philippakis explaining, “There’s no barrier between something intellectual and something you can dance to.” That and they are incredibly self-criticizing and thus, perpetually evolving musically. Maybe this is what sets apart a band like Foals from their mass produced cohorts on the TRL circuit.

Video: Foals – Balloons

Antidotes is a beat-driven masterpiece loaded with could-be singles. Standouts include Olympic Airways and Cassius, which may be the band’s unofficial head nod to their punk predecessors, and the more electronic influenced Balloons, Tron, and Big Big Love (Fig.2), with the former possibly being the best cut off the album. If you want a real trip, listen to the bonus track Mathletics while watching a Discovery Channel special on flying insects. The band admits that the guitars are played high on the fret with the purpose of sounding like harmonically inclined bugs.

Go out and grab this CD while your friends still don’t know about it and you can lord it over them. Available on iTunes.

J