Holy Fire
Foals
Transgressive Records/Sub Pop Records
Foals have redefined their sound with their most recent album, Holy Fire. The third studio album has taken a familiar Foals sound and revamped it.
“We got baked out of our gourds in this van and were driving across the desert for 18 hours over two days. After two days we got to Vegas, and it was like this polyp sticking out of the desert,” lead singer Yannis Philippakis recently spoke to rock and pop culture website The Quietus about what influenced the latest album.
Foals were met with eager ears and open minds in 2008 with the debut of their first album Antidotes. Building on the energy and momentum of the first record, they released their second album Total Life Forever in May 2010, which pigeonholed them as a uniquely alternative rock band.
Following up their endearing second album, Foals has confirmed they are a band that knows what they are doing and the direction they are going to take it in. The new record takes a step in a different direction but remains true to their unique songwriting and new wave feel, broadening the band’s appeal without alienating the die-hard Foals fans.
The first track “Prelude” sounds as if American instrumental rock band This Will Destroy You were attempting to cover a Foals track, opening the album with an inviting build-up of ’70s powered guitar licks and dissonant vocals. The most considerable difference to be felt in Holy Fire is the overall heaviness that accents the band’s energy and mathematical riffs, more consistent with the previous albums. “Inhaler” is the second track and first single that was released with a music video back in November 2012. Demonstrating a heavier tone, the track shows a new side of Foals, one that punk rockers might connect with.
Then the album takes a sudden change into a church-like bluesy howl at the beginning of “Providence.” The southern-influenced wail “I know I can’t be true, I’m an animal just like you” is foreshadowed through heavily blues-influenced choruses in “Bad Habit” and “Late Night.” Holy Fire finishes slowly with the track “Moon” which takes a very Sigur Rós feel, leaving the listener with a sense of relaxing euphoria.
Philippakis told The Quietus that he was inspired by African-American prison music coming out of the southern states in the ’30s and ’40s, specifically the ones folk music collector and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax had recorded: “It’s lingered with me. It’s not one of those obsessions that you exhaust and move on, it’s entered into the structure of the way I appreciate and think about music. It strips all the fat and the flesh of so much music away to just these ghostly voices and the sound of pickaxes on train sleepers and rocks.”
While the music might not be as instrumentally intense or even technically as impressive as the first two albums, the tracks on Holy Fire echo the energy and invasiveness of Foals with a considerable amount of earned maturity.
Holy Fire is a well-rounded example of the potential of indie rock as a genre and leaves the musical heart yearning for more of the intrepid Foals.
