Foals: What Went Down Review

Foals: What Went Down – Holy Fire’s sometime brilliant but frequently frustrating big brother

***

 After 2013’s Holy Fire elevated Foals into the alternative big leagues, the band return with What Went Down; their self-proclaimed biggest, most muscular record yet. Curtain raiser and the titular What Went Down sets the tone; taking the brutal baton begun with Prelude, passed to Inhaler and subsequently Providence, it’s the final, ferocious 100m sprint to Foal’s finish line.

The band’s reach for the arenas continues with the Radioheadesque Mountain At My Gates, and guitar leads on Birch Tree unshakeably evocative of By The Way-era Red Hot Chillis. Blending their new, riff-heavy edge (Snake Oil) with their signature oriental guitar textures (Birch Tree, Night Swimmers),What Went Down delivers some genuinely brilliant moments; with Night Swimmers, Albatross and the eponymous What Went Down proving genuinely thrilling, captivating highlights as good as anything in the band’s previous repertoire. It sounds bigger, grander, almost cinematic - and the sound of a band oozing confidence. So it’s then strange that What Went Down should prove such a frustrating, unbalanced listen.

Increasingly bloated as it progresses, and too often settling into drawn out, dead-end melodies, it lacks the dynamism and excitement that made Holy Fire (think Prelude, Providence) such a compelling record. Yannis Philippakis’s wild vocals give the album drama and passion to match its elaborate, blockbuster melodies; but fail to give gravitas and weight to weak, melodramatic lyrics (‘When I come to walk the line, the fire may come, but we'll be just fine’).

Ultimately, What Went Down sounds like a band brimming with confidence and urgency, but what is sometimes brilliant is more frequently indulgent, pretentious and bloated - sonically and in length. An album that should be captivating instead sounds predictable and frustrating, leaving the band's swagger feeling uncomfortably misplaced and its audience wondering what might, or should, have been.