Few bands ever reach this plain, but for Foals ‘What Went Down‘ sees them in a place seldom occupied: they’re in the hyper-real state known as Flow.
A term first coined in 1990 by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (roughly) applies to a condition in which humans gain happiness and fulfillment from being at what inspirational office posters call “the edge of their comfort zone”, a sort of Zen derived by the subject’s complete absorption in an activity.
In the case of the Oxford five piece, that “thing” is the journey to escaping the painfully narrow definitions of Britain’s indie scene, a catharsis which with this, their fourth album, they’ve taken giant, conscious and irreversible steps towards.
To do so they’ve had to surrender mercifully few principles, although the math-rock obfuscation of their debut ‘Antidotes‘ is on this evidence largely in the past. Its successors – the more warmly textured ‘Total Life Forever‘ and 2013’s breakthrough sealing ‘Holy Fire‘ – were revolutionary only by exception, but found a willing audience amongst those bemused by the Arctic Monkeys‘ direction or scornful of Coldplay‘s weediness. Unlikely everymen then, the day to seize is now upon them.
‘What Went Down’ is the invigorating, ambitious platform that should make this possible. Less of a gamble so much as a calculated risk, it bears all the hallmarks of a band at ease with itself and radiates an inner confidence – one which Foals collectively might be the first to admit they haven’t always felt in the past. Some of this unintentional hubris may stem from their highly self-critical frontman Yannis Phillipakis, some of it from producer James Ford, but within seconds of the titular opener’s monster riffs and act-of-god tempo kicking in, Kansas has indeed gone bye bye, the obtuse intricacies of the group’s previous work dissolved.
Here Phillipakis’ voice writhes, straining at the leash with desperation and rage, grit in an oyster which has been cracked open by a fool. A classic side one, track one in an age which has consigned the idea to history, it also tacitly says to main stage contemporaries everywhere that they need to shuffle up and make some room.
This new found viscerality lurks beneath the surface constantly like a shark’s fin, but is only released into the wild again on the closer ‘A Knife In The Ocean‘, woven into a song whose sky scraping chorus and epic quiet-loud sequences buffet the listener throughout nearly seven of progressive, ecstatic modern rock.
In between, ‘What Went Down’ shimmers with invention. The free air Foals are now breathing is revelatory; while the delicate weave of ‘Albatross‘ ebbs and flows, ‘Snake Oil‘ is as unremittingly dirty and distorted as the band have ever seen fit to be. A man who knows little of compromise, the overwhelming schema remains that where Phillipakis’ head is, their fortunes will follow and reassuringly his remorse on the soulful ‘London Thunder‘ reveals a psyche steering away from its past attempts at self destruction. Equally, where an angrier, younger man might have turned his back dismissively on Holy Fire’s pop leanings, instead they’re smartly re-embraced via the likes of ‘Birch Tree‘, ‘Mountain At My Gates‘ and the slightly gloomy but hook filled ‘Lonely Hunter‘.
Halfway through one of those the frontman mischievously sings, “I’ll drive a car without the brakes”, but the threat is purely rhetorical; his audience need him more than ever and he knows it. Calling albums “mature” in the twenty first century only serves to dust them with an un-hip, unwanted cache, but ‘What Went Down’ is just that, an assured, collective major leap forward both in vision and momentum. You sense by the end that for the first time ever, Foals are moving without any heed of friction, that whatever comes, this is a time they’ll recognise as one when they were in the subconscious grip of flow.
What happens when the cocktail of adrenaline and magic fades defies prediction, but for now there is absolutely no call to do anything other than listen and thrill to a group brave enough to re-orient stadium rock to a plain all of their own making.
