FOALS - Holy Fire

Foals are without doubt, among all the young English bands to have emerged over the past decade, one of the most distinctive and naturally gifted outfits around. The quintet fronted by the visionary Yannis Philippakis betrayed a strong personality and a taste all of its own right from its singular beginnings, almost always to be commended, for an experimentation that is open and entirely free in its intentions - "all-encompassing", so to speak. After the dazzling minimalism of "Antidotes", all math syncopation and hypnotic avant-pop asymmetries, the Oxford band arrived at the "classic" definition of the opus magnum "Total Life Forever", a work of considerable production effort, deliberately monumental and stately in its bearing, often under the banner of a highly sophisticated "tropical-prog" (a self-coined term from the band itself), shot through with complex architectural textures and dizzying neo-romantic flourishes.

The long shadow of that old (and in any case beautiful) record stretches out to brush against the new "Holy Fire", a third chapter that cost the English band a long and highly composite gestation, developed between Australia (where the group worked for a time alongside their friends The Lost Valentinos), then passing through their native Oxford and finally London, alongside top-flight producers such as Flood and Alan Moulder. Despite the geographical to-ing and fro-ing, "Holy Fire" comes across on listening as a compact, cohesive album, dominated above all by the band's determination to lend their magmatic vein an even subtler measure, clarity and lightness, at times absolute.

After the sumptuous instrumental opening of "Prelude", the math-funk flurries gradually recede and settle into the perfect syntax of "Inhaler", a thoroughbred single, the mark of a great band, with a chorus that claws almost like Jane's Addiction, which clearly showcases the band's extremely subtle technical skill (best appreciated live), often bordering on instrumental preciousness, as well as their great mastery in weaving rhythmic tapestries of labyrinthine complexity (worth following the track's coda, almost mutant-disco). The same observations hold for the adjacent "My Number", "Out Of The Woods", the supreme "Providence" (a small Crimson-esque arabesque) and "Everytime" (among the best things here): fluid dynamics, shimmering tonal shadings, sinuous, well-turned melodies, all in service of rhythmic organisms that breathe within their own highly ordered circularity, straddling Wyatt-like paradoxes, Talk Talk-style intellectualism and obliquely danceable prog-funk quirks.

What partly chips away at the completeness and stylistic perfection of the record - which nonetheless works well as a whole - are probably the too-numerous atmospheric ballads, the mid-tempo pieces that try to recapture (without ever matching in quality) the glories of the old "Spanish Sahara" or "This Orient". The strenuous watercolour approach of "Bad Habit", "Late Night" and "Stepson" thus ends up diluting the executional tension beyond what's needed, dampening the balance of the whole. Curious nonetheless is the quasi-ambient experiment of the impalpable "Moon", a genuine final decompression chamber.

Notwithstanding these last observations, "Holy Fire" remains a full, well-rounded record, at once airy and vigorous, enhanced by a lavish production that knows how to assert itself with elegant, decisive flair, and which reconfirms - if it were ever in doubt - the sheer quality of Foals, relaunching their ambitions for the days still to come.

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22/02/2013