In the face of an everlasting Brit-pop invasion, Oxford five-piece group Foals, are creating something refreshing different – so different in fact, that music analysts are finding it difficult to describe them. As vocalist Yannis Philippakis explains, just don’t call them math-rock.
‘Math-rock’ is becoming a commonly used term, and like most journalistic constructions, it’s often at odds with the bands that are supposedly creating it. Battles and Minus The Bear are apparently carrying this torch and Oxford’s newest exports, Foals, have found themselves in the same category.
Foals’ guitarist and singer, Yannis Philippakis, finds it quite ironic. He admits that his previous group, the cult, experimental band The Edmund Fitzgerald had ‘math’ qualities, in as much as they were indulgent and liked to fool around with over-lapping time signatures. But Foals is designed to be a reaction against his past. If anything, their debut album, Antidotes, is a collection of complex pop tunes. “The ‘math-rock’ term is quite funny. When we playing in the Oxford music scene in The Edmund Fitzgerald, that term was getting banded around a lot. But we find it quite amusing [in Foals] to be called that. Anyone that knows anything about real, technical music, will notice that we play in 4/4 most of the time,” says Philippakis.
The singer considered his previous group to be too serious and wanted to start something that was fresh and fun. Forming Foals, Philippakis utilised a lot of the guitar sounds that he’d created previously. “I’ve never had guitar lessons or anything, so the guitat-style we’ve come up with is really making the most out of a bad situation. So I’ve always played this way. Foals also uses the idea of interlocking structures within the music. But Foals is much more of a pop-band. Edmund was ridiculous – we would write these fifteen-minute, prog epics. It was our self-indulgent band and there wasn’t a lot of communication [with the listener]. Foals can make people feel something, whereas our previous band was just about seeing how weird we could be,” admits Philippakis.
Foals’ debut album is a carefully constructed layering of sounds. Often starting with a repetitive guitar or drum/bass line, the songs slowly morph into a moving pop song – there’s a sonic density, while remaining sparse. Every nuance, including brass sections, are carefully placed. Vocally, the lyrics reverberate with chanted rhythm. Melodies are seemingly draped over the bare bones of instrumentation.
Antidotes was produced by TV On The Radio guitarist Dave Sitek and although he was well-suited to the job, Foals chose not to use his final mix of the record. “[Dave Sitek] took it on a tangent that we hadn’t expected and it started to feel less and less like our record. In remixing it, we reclaimed our record,” chuckles Philippakis.
The group’s song-writing process is collaborative, but Philippakis is the mind behind the lyrics. By the time you’ve listened to the albums two opening tracks, ‘The French Open’ and the single ‘Cassius’, it’s evident that the singer has a strong inclination towards minimalism. “It’s about getting away from clutter. I was inspired by listening to Steve Reich (and American composer and pioneer of minimalist music). It’s about viewing sound as an architectual thing, or looking at music on a molecular level. The parts come together to form something that is complicated, but also very sparse and restrained. [The members of Foals] grew up appreciating people that could do that, because it was lacking in ourselves,” says Philippakis.
When asked how the album’s title, Antidotes, applies to the subject matter of the album, Philippakis is elusive to say the least. “I don’t really want to give it away. The whole point of the lyrics is that there isn’t one justifiable explanation for it. It’s more about it being a relay race – I’m passing the batton on to you. There’s ideas about ‘getting away’, ‘escapism’, and ‘waste’. It’s about feeling smothered by something,” says the singer.
“The lyrics are intensely personal for me, but I just don’t like the tradional method of writing them. There seems to be a trend where the front man writes the lyrics, discussing his own personal problems, then hopefully it becomes universal. I like to write visual images expressed through words. Hopefully they are emotive lyrics, but I don’t like the idea of tracing them back to the singer. My voice on the record is meant to be a dissembodied – it’s a guiding voice that goes along with your own internal monologue. It’s a verbal light to lead you to a place that you want to go,” continues Philippakis.
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