Foals : Mathletics

This was a tough one. One of the problems with these posts is that often there are so many good songs on an album, it's tough to pick just one. You want it to be one of the better ones, but not one that maybe lots of people have heard, assuming they've heard of the band at all.

The members of Foals (not The Foals; try not to be so gauche...) all previously members of obscure British math-rock bands before they decided to "have more fun" and put this record together. And that's exactly what it sounds like: a couple of angry prog-loving musicians who decided to cut a dance-rock album. It's something along the lines of Talking Heads meet King Crimson, if you can imagine that.

"Mathletics" (the other songs up for consideration were "Hummer" and "Red Socks Pugie") is probably the strongest rocker of the bunch. It's got a driving rock backbeat that's just littered with the Frippiest guitars you've ever heard this side of, well, Robert Fripp. It hammers along through verse and chorus until it can barely stand, groaning under the collected weight of all those notes, and it crashes into a cathartic, pounding bridge with no fewer than three guitars (plus bass) noising it up. It's like a rock reduction, with all the rest of the crap boiled away, leaving just the pure thick essence of rock. Delicious!

"Mathletics" comes from Foals' first album, Antidotes. It's listed as a 'bonus track', except it seems to be on every version of the album. I guess it was originally a non-album single. Regardless, the album is great, if you like this stuff, but it is not particularly varied, so you need to really like it. I do. One of my favorite albums last year.

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