Foals

Let Paul Lester guide you through the minefield of new bands, to find a bunch of brainy punk-funksters who specialise in music to make girls dance.

Guardian Unlimited


Where's the herb garden?... Foals

Hometown: They're from Oxford, but they've just moved to Brighton where they share a three-storey house - with its own herb garden, in case you wondered.

The line-up: Jimmy (guitar, keyboards), Yannic (guitar, vocals), Edwin (keyboards), Walter (bass) and Jack (drums) - apparently, like Madonna and Jarvis, they don't need surnames.

The background: Foals are no fools - in fact, they're undergraduates who have just dropped out of Oxford Uni after one year to pursue a career as the brainiest punk-funksters in Britain. Another band for whom the Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers was Year Zero, Foals have just signed to Transgressive Records, home of Battle, the Young Knives and Polytechnic. With nothing available to buy as yet on CD, it's the live gig where Foals are in their element: they take Franz Ferdinand's "music to make girls dance" credo to the max, using guitars, drums, voice, bass and keyboards to make a sort of manic, organic, polyrhythmic electronica. But they're not indie kids: they're bang into techno and labels like B-Pitch and Kompact. To see the crowds going mental at their gigs to the intricate crossplay of chants and beats, you'd think you were at a rave. A new rave! Nah, it'll never catch on...

The buzz: Foals' techno-played-on-guitars shtick is wowing the cognoscenti: "They're like an Afrobeat Don Caballero," gasped a member of Franz Ferdinand, while a journalist who caught them onstage recently frothed at the mouth about their "quivering electro ferocity, interweaving Cif-clean guitars that sound like stars falling from space onto great lakes and clinically sharp stop/start drumming", before passing out.

The truth: If you were around circa 1980-1, the first time white punks got funk, you might not experience the quasi-religious ecstasy of yer average Foals nut. Nevertheless, this is pretty exciting stuff.

Most likely to: Cause a new dance sensation to sweep the nation called The Foal.

Least likely to: Make a second album of ambient chilltronica full of little fluffy beats and sheep bleats.

File next to: The Pop Group, Pigbag, Fire Engines, Klaxons.

What to buy: Foals' debut single, as yet untitled, will be released by Transgressive on February 12, 2007.

Useful links: Their MySpace page

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