And now, the story so far:
Oxfordshire band Foals have decided to split their new album Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost in two, the high concept being that with the human race standing on the verge of an environmental and social precipice, it’s time for everyone to make their peace with whoever and prepare for the really bad stuff.
We pick things up at the beginning of part two…
OK, maybe this is a little bit too comic strip in its treatment, but the idea of releasing a double album in installments does lend itself to some satirical coverage, as well as being twice the effort for Foals themselves.
If you thought, however, that the intervening period would’ve dulled Yannis Philippakis’ sense of ambition and bombast, you really haven’t been following the band’s career: “Part one ended with a lot of fire and destructive imagery” he’s said. “Part two is trying to respond to that: how do you continue in the wreckage and through the scorched earth?”
OK. And if music is the answer then after the quiet foreboding of opener Red Desert, its rhythm is one that underlines the fear, confusion and guilt of being a survivor on a planet stripped of any humanity.
What makes us people is a complex hierarchy of course, such that a global crisis is still a billion pixel collage of our weaknesses. Squaring off against the odds is the theme of The Runner, on which the band graft a harder edge to the saga, a riff first, ask questions later blast with a raucous edge that continues on 10,000 Feet.
It’s the damaged, cut sharp aggression of Black Bull that drags everything down with it though: “Don’t look at me like that” screams Philippakis, railing against the straitjacket of male expression or suppression whilst guitars harden and scrape beside the words. In this instant they’ve never sounded more desperate.
This is you feel, however, the sort of storm which will eventually have to blow itself out, and over time the ferocity ebbs into something more reflective: the tumbling pianos of Ikaria call the halt, a new calm which ushers in the glassy eyed melancholia of Dreaming and its predecessor Like Lightning.
Consciously or not the end comes in the water, life’s birthplace and where on Into The Surf and Neptune every journey finishes. The latter especially is, at over ten minutes long, the sort of expression which lends itself to having eight months to stretch out an idea, a series of passages and jams which seem to contain no answers before, gathering their flock again, the quartet deliver a suitably uncompromising climax, a scramble onto dry land only to turn around and face the onrushing tsunami on their heels.
Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost has been much more than a slick marketing idea to Yannis Philippakis, a project just as much of an exploration of Foals’ ability to build a creative assault course and make it through. Could it have been one heavily edited but brilliant record? Maybe. But they’ve earned the right to be indulged, if only just this once.
Epilogue: For the Foals boys the adventure is over. But for how long?
