"Fumes of energy and ambition"
(credit: www.imdb.com)
Foals
Foals
Antidotes
(Sub Pop)
**
Antidotes is a “really good” first album but not a great one, said New Musical Express. Britain was buzzing about this quintet from Oxford even before the disc hit the streets: Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis helped things along with preposterous claims that Foals would revolutionize British music. A painstakingly calculated blend of punchy dance-rock and whirring post-punk, Antidotes is undoubtedly a “sleek and exhilarating” debut. But the “brainy, mathletic puzzle-popsters,” having informed everyone of their potential, ultimately fail to fulfill it. “Fumes of energy and ambition” suffuse the album, said Ben Ratliff in The New York Times. Producer Dave Sitek, of TV on the Radio, helped nurture their talent, bringing “echo and texture and atmosphere to a band whose sound is as narrow as a Giacometti sculpture.” But the overconfident Foals made the last-minute decision to remix the album themselves. The result is an aural onslaught of “hard, trebly, uncomfortable, spiky, anxious, uptight, straining-to-be-different” music, at once grating and fascinating. Antidotes offers plenty of “momentum and intrigue,” said Tom Ewing in Pitchforkmedia.com. But it lacks “graspable emotion or explanation.” The band’s songs are dance-floor friendly and admirably constructed, but they don’t add up to a first-rate album.
