Foals' fourth album What Went Down was a bit of surprise release for me, I expected there to be a typical three year gap for development, but the announcement was a welcome one.
Despite the fact I fount Holy Fire a wee bit disappointing, it still had some tremendous songs, some that would easily sit in a top ten list had I ever bothered to write one and after hearing the title track, I was again left pondering whether the band could deliver another shot at the converted album of the year title.
The good news is that What Went Down is a much closer contender and overall, much more concise, tighter and enjoyable album than Holy Fire.
The album is however, not the dramatic transformation that happened between Antidotes and Total Life Forever and instead, is more of a retread of Holy Fire with some sprinklings, oddly enough, of stadium-lite pop songs.
Whilst the title track is a heavy, sonically distorted titan which sets the tone for a loud record, the album, much like Antidotes, switches back from foot-stomping, headbanging indie rock anthems to much more reserved but catchy ditty pop tracks.
Mountain At My Gates delicately balances the line between both, delivering something that sounds similar to personal favourite This Orient but with a much better hook for a chorus and chord progression. Coming straight after however is Birch Tree and Give It All; the former, easily the most poppy creation by the band which sadly, sounds out of place on the record and the latter; a stripped back, Pop-era, U2 lite creation that is more failed experiment than game changer.
Thankfully, the second half spends its time recovering and does so, demonstrating that the band are more at home with their longer tracks and What Went Down has plenty of them. The aforementioned title track is a superb opener that deceitfully sets the tone for an entire record, whilst slap-bang in the middle is Albatross, similar to Birch Tree but with far better execution and utilising a simple but pulsating beat to give the track more grandeur and scope.
Night Swimmers is the closest the band gets to recapturing the sound of Antidotes, if Mountain...is a rehash of This Orient, then this is a retread of Olympic Airways, albeit slower and more mature. The album dramatically closes on A Knife in the Ocean, polar opposite to Holy Fire's slow and beautiful Moon, half the track sounds like a take on California surf pop, but it culminates into the more typical modern Foals brand of sonically satisfying wails of effects pedals and frontman Yannis Philippakis' distinct and catchy shouts to a fade out.
Even the somewhat shorter tracks like Snake Oil and Lonely Hunter are much better than their first half equivalents. Snake Oil shares a resemblance to Providence, but instead of the cluttered but superb jungle calamity of before, it instead sticks with fuzzy bass and loud percussion. Lonely Hunter in the meanwhile, serves as a nice penultimate track, using easy-on-the-ears synths and more catchy hooks for choruses.
Ultimately, minus the early hiccup at the start of the record, the album is a mostly solid entry in Foals' ever-growing back catalogue. The same observation that was made with Holy Fire is again, the album doesn't reach the greatness of Total Life Forever, although part of me puts that down to how successful a transition of style that album was before considering how unbelievably consistent in quality it was too.
What Went Down, whilst starting off great, hits a wall in the first half but does it's damnedest to break through it and does succeed. It has a nice blend of longer indie-rock, the occasional flash of pop brilliance and is a much more consistent record than its predecessor but, much like I said at the end of my Holy Fire review, it doesn't surpass Total Life Forever.
Fortunately, it's much closer and easily, one of the highlights of the year.
8/10
H
@Retcon_Nation
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