Ghostly figures shifting through deep blue water – the cover of Foals’ sophomore album Total Life Forever, yes, but also the sort of image that comes to mind frequently throughout its melancholy fifty minutes. The fretted guitar lines and faint echo effect on the strained vocals are reminiscent of the Stone Roses (a hefty enough comparison) but it’s the measured use of electric guitar and sombre synths and beeps that create a dense, immersive feeling to the music. Their debut Antidotes was a quicker-paced but more unbalanced affair, where the panicked crash of sounds dissolved any specificity of mood. Total Life Forever may shoot for a more fatalistic mood that its predecessor, but it captures it precisely, without losing the unique sound that made people’s ears stick up – hear the very Foals-ian cacophony of clacking guitar lines that strikes up halfway through ‘After Glow’, or the slightly jazzy, bouncy hookline to ‘Miami’.
The representative centrepiece of the album is ‘Spanish Sahara’ – unique in how bare and quiet it starts out as, but the delicate build up into a frenetic mania can be seen across the entire album’s panorama of desolate reflection. For while moments of empowerment break out – in single ‘This Orient’, where the “Western feeling” a lover gives the singer is turned back to lift her just the same – Total Life Forever is an album where the joy that infected the shuffling synths and high-pitched guitar on their debut are now shot through with a depression and air of impending doom. Despite this, it never feels tired or glib; instead, Foals have made the fatalistic mood feel as though it isn’t being fought or accepted, merely narrated – this is, essentially, the soundtrack to a descent into darkness. And damn if it isn’t rather enthralling.
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David Upton
