Antidotes

They have crafted a terrific debut album and are prime to make a dent in the indie community.

Thanks in part to indie super-producer David Andrew Sitek, they've got a vibrant sonic presence, and they write excellent songs.

They do make thoroughly exciting music that becomes quickly airborne, able to move the listener to a different plane with disarming ease.

Antidotes feels like riding a tea-tray down an icy mountainside. [Apr 2008, p.106]

This is an exciting debut.

A perfectly executed debut as might be expected from a band championed in OMM53 for their mathematical precision.

By tossing some horns and a variety of dark basslines into the mix, the U.K. quintet creates intense, unique songs that are more than a sum of their influences.

Foals make hard, trebly, uncomfortable, spiky, anxious, uptight, straining-to-be-different music, and for all that, it’s rather good.

The two guitars pick out cascading notes--never chords--against one another, the bass borrows from both Interpol and Gang of Four, and Philippakis' voice cries out in repetition wonderfully, but it's these occasional horn bursts, the electronic chops and blips, that truly complete the songs, making "Antidotes" not merely a lesson in post-new wave noodling, but evidence of the power and excitement of the genre and music itself.

Fantastic. This is the best new band Sub Pop has worked with in years. [June 2008, p.131]

While it's true that the sheer precision of their playing is what makes some songs as great as they are, the organic touches of horns and textural washes of electronics help the group move into ground that hasn't been mined as much.

Their debut sounds sleek and exhilarating, although Foals seem cautious about completely breaking out of the punk-funk strictures that have confined them so far.

They never let math get in the way of a good time. [Apr 2008, p.96]

Antidotes is frequently exhilarating, challenging but immediate, cryptic and catchy, calm then frantic, as intricate, itchy fret-webs are weaved around Afrobeat drums and far-out sonics.

Philippakis loves further obscuring cryptic lyrics with his delirious yawps. Mostly that's fine, since sublimely hypnotic arrangements of horn bursts and techno glitch beats generally render meaning unnecessary. But all that yelping about "electric shocks" ("Big Big Love [Fig. 2]") might be better buried in a dub mix.

Foals are a tight band with hook-laden grooves. Not worth the hype, but definitely worth keeping an eye on.