FOALS - Total Life Forever

The Oxford quintet returns with their highly anticipated second album of new material, buoyed by the solid acclaim earned by their fine 2008 debut "Antidotes".

Recorded in Gothenburg, in a deliberately contemplative isolation far from the sprawling, poisonous glare of the British music press they love to hate (which, from the very start, had placed a firm bet on the band's heroic exploits, and which, this very week, has them gracing the knowing cover of NME), "Total Life Forever" boasts production from Luke Smith (former mastermind of the sadly rather unlucky Clor) and shows, from the very first bars of the opening, manifesto-like "Blue Mood", a sharp and in its own way inexorable shift in direction - one that feels necessary all the same.

Frontman Yannis Philippakis, a bearded satyr given to feverish, epileptic mannerisms, packed into his five-foot-something frame of pure mathematical-compositional delirium, proves on this brand-new record - which, starting from the cover art itself, somehow bears witness to the band's newfound "blue period" - a vision so lucid it borders on hallucination. What he delivers to our weary ears is a mighty, ambitious fresco of oblique, elusive prog-funk, in which the band's conceptual-deconstructive approach finally manages to mesh perfectly with songwriting that has in the meantime grown surprisingly sophisticated, dense with cross-references and bold triangulations between composite genres that never quite settle into predictability as they intertwine with meticulous care.

If the previous record was thus an anatomical dissection of post-punk's corpse, carried out almost to the point of pure conceptual discipline, with "Total Life Forever" the British band begins to lay onto the edges of that same abstract skeleton the full-bodied, pulsing flesh of a warm, vital dream.

In songs that are, incidentally, very fine - like "Black Gold", "Miami" or "Total Life Forever" - the band's usual unhinged math-funk equations (poised between a mangled Liars going up against Sparks, and a kind of singable pop crossbreed of Can, Talking Heads and Don Caballero) tend to unfurl into broader, more enveloping instrumental expanses, and from the pared-down synthesis of their old minimalist haikus we arrive here at the inexorable logic of a more ethereal, dreamlike sound, in which it's not hard to detect a faint, vaguely Latin rhythmic pulse as well (not for nothing did the band themselves describe it as "tropical prog").

All this is all the more evident on the remarkable "Spanish Sahara", "After Glow" (its spiralling progression is truly spellbinding), "2 Trees", or on the gorgeous "This Orient" (brushed by an airy, Wyatt-like sense of unbridgeable distance) - all compositions marked by a hazy, dreamlike, trance-like touch, stretched between the rhythmic rationalism of lines and volumes and the oneiric vision of a purely interior poetry, which at times brings to mind the intuitions of the likes of Japan, Blue Nile, all the way down to Elbow or even certain less obvious Coldplay moments.

Foals thus run their palm over the smooth surface of a metaphysical, thoughtful sound, akin to an abyss of clashing reflections and optical refractions, which make "Total Life Forever" a demanding, convincing album that we'll inevitably have to reckon with. Applause.

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12/05/2010