On their debut Antidotes, produced by TV On The Radios Dave Sitek, Foals stepped from their stalls with shifty post-punk grooves, kinetic percussion, and nervous, sulky vibes. By 2013, with Holy Fire, they smoothed and super-sized their sound with production from U2 vets Flood and Alan Moulder. Their latest LP finds Foals mostly self-producing, with help from engineer Brett Shaw (Florence and The Machine, Robyn), and swinging for what used to be the fences on a proggy, ambitious project; part two is due this fall.
Bless em for their ambition, and too bad it didnt yield more than this muddled set. So far, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost reads as a post-apocalyptic song cycle about life after an eco-disaster, where sand dunes fill up all our towns, and robots have made the rounds and theres no birds left to fly thought curiously, we later learn the birds are all singing Its the end of the world. (Perhaps theyre penguins, still struggling with identity issues.) Trump, or recovered memories of him, continues to haunt. A reference to the Sargasso Sea could be a literary nod, a shout-out to the North Atlantic Garbage Patch, a reverie of privileged movements in the Bahamas, or just a portentiously unmoored signifier. Conceptually, the LP comes off at best as a less multi-cultural Damon Albarn project; it worst, its Coldplay reimagining Tales From Topographic Oceans.
To be sure, Foals can still bring compelling grooves: see the percussion-spiked funk of In Degrees and the glistening Caf DAthens, whose dubby marimba vibe recalls Tortoise, A Certain Ratio, and the sort of rangy late-20th century rock music the band used to conjure regularly. Here, its a detour on whats otherwise a generic throwback not as slavish in its retreads as Greta Van Fleet, but a drag from a band capable of more. Well see whats up with Pt. 2.