Released back in February, Holy Fire finds itself at number 10 in Breaking More Waves favourite albums of the year list. The third long player from the Oxford based five piece is their loosest sounding record and also their most ambitious. It doesn’t always strike the right chords, but like many other albums in our top 15 of 2013, sometimes it’s the faults in the record that are as endearing as the moments of perfection. When a rock band’s record is labelled as ambitious, there’s a tendency to think of them aiming to be the next U2 or Coldplay; aiming for stadiums and music for the masses that will drink lager out of four pound plastic pints and bawl along to the big choruses. Holy Fire isn’t one of those records. It has songs that stood no chance of getting in the UK Top 40 - although the choppy grooves of My Number became the bands biggest hit in the UK at no.23. Instead their ambition is demonstrated in the way that Holy Fire sounds broader and sonically more confident that their previous work which was often twitchy, introverted and sounded as if too many barriers had been imposed by the band to enable themselves to really cut loose. Take Milk & Black Spiders which spirals into something rather beautiful by its end or Inhaler a dirty claustrophobic rock song that shows just how muscular Foals can be. It's tunes like these that make Holy Fire a fantastic rock record. In a year when indie rock has struggled to do anything more than simply repeat itself with ever decreasing returns, Holy Fire steps out of that circle and wins. The best British indie rock album of the year. Foals - Inhaler
We haven’t really talked enough about the third Foals album. Ok, we haven’t really talked about it at all here, but the point is we really should, because it’s a fine record. It finds the band growing in stature and confidence, being a much looser production than previous work, sounding free of any mental chains that may have tied them in the past.
Yesterday the band posted a new video for Bad Habit, one of the songs from Holy Fire. It shows a dishevelled and dehydrated Yannis stumbling through the desert (a Spanish Sahara perhaps?) after a lady who just like the band certainly seems to have loosened herself from any constraints that were holding her back - she's stark naked. We just hope she remembered to put on some high protection sunblock first.
Creating a list of your top ten albums of the year should, on the face of it, be relatively easy. The biggest enemy is time. If an album released in February is still much treasured by December there’s a fair chance it’s going to remain a favourite. An album released only three or four weeks ago is harder to judge. Sometimes no matter how much you think you love something initially, time tells a different tale. Look back through your record collection and you’ll almost inevitably find something that will make you question your state of mind at the time. That’s OK though, records are like human relationships. Some form long term partnerships from the start, some grow on you and some start in a fury of passion but quickly die out.
The next biggest enemy is order. Is it really possible to say that X album is eighth best and Y is ninth? Wake up, roll over and on the next day X may be nine and Y seven.
Against this context, over the next ten days we present our ten albums of the year. Some will be no surprise to regular readers of the blog, but some may be. This is a personal list of the records that we’ve formed the best relationships with this year – be it something deep and long lasting or something a little more heady, giddy and spontaneous that will shortly fizzle out. A number of them appear on other published lists - after all a good album is a good album, and sometimes a number of people are going to agree. Right? Then there's taste. It's a funny old thing that maybe explains why one or two of our choices may be a little different. We're possibly going out on a limb with our #8 and #2 choices for example. It's not that our taste is good or bad, right or wrong - just different to some others, sometimes.
This time next year we may think differently about some of these albums, right now that’s impossible to tell, nobody can predict the future. However, we’re damn sure that the top 3 in our list will remain as our top 3. Whilst we might internally quarrel about the relative merits and positions of the albums listed between 4 and 10, our number 1 album stands majestically above everything else we’ve heard this year – and albums 2 and 3 are also solid in their positions.
But before that, here are five acts that didn't quite make our top ten, but whom all produced fine albums this year that would have certainly featured in our top 20. There are videos from Emeralds experimental sci-fi retro synth brilliance on Does It Look Like I'm Here ? and Foals development to a more expansive sound on Total Life Forever, plus streams fromKylie's solid pop on Aphrodite, our One's to Watch 2009 Marina and the Diamond's coming up trumps with her idiosyncratic debut and London's Revere showing just what can be done in terms of dynamics with their album Hey Selim!
Then below all that we recap our previous albums of the year from 2008 and 2009. Our countdown for this year starts tomorrow around 5pm GMT.
There’s a moment during Foals set at Brighton Dome where lead singer Yannis takes an athletic run and launches himself off the stage and into the crowd. It’s a leap of confidence that you can also hear on the bands second album Total Life Forever, which picked up a Mercury Prize nomination and saw them creating one of the singles of the year in Spanish Sahara.
These launches upwards and outwards are conveyed in every sense in their live shows – from the eager sold-out anticipating crowd, rammed with teenagers and young twenties down the front who demand the band with shouts and handclaps even before they take to the stage, to the groups arresting and sonically expansive songs that fill the Dome with intricate guitar work, a sense of space and oddball indie disco rhythms. It’s compelling stuff and shows a band growing and loosening up in every way, yet never compromising.
As the teenage girls on shoulders and fisting pumping lads bounce towards celebratory oblivion, older more sedate audience members could consider possible musical resemblances to The Cure. Yannis howls and yelps with intensity on some songs and whispers in near falsetto gentleness on others against guitars that funk and chime in equal but different doses. It creates the same kind of mesmerizing atmosphere that Robert Smith and co used to be able to create, and occasionally still do. However Smith probably wouldn’t display the same levels of showmanship that the Foals lead singer does; as the show climaxes with a huge sounding Two Steps Twice he mounts the speaker stack and from there journeys onto the balcony with guitar in hand much to the delight of the audience. At another point he emerges from the side of the venue and walks his way through the heaving crowd back to the stage.
Foals have bloomed into a composed, musically self-assured band that is now beginning to display hints of greatness. If they continue to progress at this rate they could soon be arena bound.
If you read this post as it appears on line we will be probably be driving back from a Foals gig in the cooler city 50 miles down the road from our own hometown – Brighton.
Foals are a band that we fell in love with on the release of Mathletics and even more so with Hummer then lost steam upon hearing debut album Antidotes. Total Life Forever rekindled the fires though, partially through Mount Kimbie’s incredibly sparse and moving remix of Spanish Sahara, which we've posted below in case you have been living on the moon. So whilst we’ve been (hopefully) enjoying Foals tonight (and the previously blogged support Trophy Wife) we thought it would be a good time to remind you that the bands new single Blue Blood was released yesterday. If you haven’t seen the video for Blue Blood it really is worth a look – a slightly creepy yet funny lip-sync / interpretative dance piece by a schoolboy.
