SOUNDTRACK: FOALS-Holy Fire (2012).
I 
loved Foals’ debut album Antidotes, it was a modern rock/prog rock/dancable mashup with angular guitars and all kinds of weird time signatures. Then Foals returned with a new album which I haven’t heard anything of, except to have heard that it was very different. Then I heard “Inhaler” from this album and I loved it. It was easily in my top ten songs of 2012.
But it was so different from the Foals of Antidotes that I wasn’t sure what to make of it. And in fact, that Foals, with all of their angularity, has been replaced by this much dancier version of the band.
“Prelude” is like an extended intro to “Inhaler.” It’s 4 minutes of intro music with chatter and noises. Then comes “Inhaler,” a slow building song that rises and falls, rises again then falls again and then bursts into a big rocking chorus. It’s fantastic, it feels louder than is possible for such a song. “My Number” introduces some of that unusual staccato song style but in a far more dancey framework. The synths are louder and bolder. I really like this song. “Bad Habit” is a far slower song, but it’s a nice tempo changer. And the chorus is still catchy.
“Everytime” brings in more shoegaze elements (so let’s see, there’s angular punk, shoegaze and dance music here). This song even has a discoey chorus. “Late Night” and “Out of the Woods” feel even more dancey than the earlier tracks–with a kind of earlier 80s British alt rock flavor–spiky guitars and exotic percussion. I hear some of the guitar sounds of early U2 as well, especially on the intro of “Milk & Black Spiders” (the rest of the song sounds nothing like U2.
“Providence” brings back some of that louder guitar, coupled nicely with a combination of shoegaze and screamy vocals. The heavy guitar plays a very nice counterpoint to the picking of the second guitar. It’s the last great song on the record. “Stepson” is a slow song, the slowest on the disc, and I fear that it rather runs out of steam. “Moon” continues the slow drifting sense of the end of the album. It’s pretty song, but it feels so far removed from “Inhaler” that it seems to be from a different record.
So I’m not entirely sure what to make of this record. It has a few great songs, and then a number of songs that seem to want to go in a different direction, but what direction that might be remains unclear.
[READ: September 6, 2014] “The Happy Valley”
Lucky Peach 10 is “The Street Food Issue,” and it is a fun issue with all kinds of interesting food you can buy on the street (and recipes to try them at home).
Like food in tubes. Take “Sausage Quest” (what the locals do with their various sausages all around the world), or “I Went to Thailand and All I Got was a Sausage Stuffed in My Mouth” (I can’t wait to make sausage blossoms). Beyond sausages there’s a list of the most compelling street foods around the world from New York to Naples to Tunisia. We look at street food vendors in Malaysia and South East Asia. And then we meet the Lucha Doughnut Man of East LA (Mexican donna vendor by day and masked wrestler by night).
Then there’s some articles that are not about food. Like the surprising article about the microbiology of used cigarette butts (no butts were eaten). Or the very interesting history of charcoal (which dates back to Henry Ford). I had no idea charcoal came from trees. There’s an essay about rapper Jibbs and his song “Chain Hang Low” which was apparently ubiquitous in 2006 although I don’t know it). The essay discusses how it used “Turkey in the Straw” as a motif. Most likely, he took it from the ice cream trucks that he heard as a kid, but there is a whole history of racism packed in to that song, let me tell you.
I enjoyed the idea (throughout the issue) that if you’re in a new place, sometimes you can’t always trust reviews for what’s good, you just have to trust your gut (and your nose).
Then there’s several articles about corn. Making tortillas or masa–the whole process of nixtamilization. (more…)
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Back in 2008, Foals were a weird indie rock band. Cryptic, with odd instrumental passages. By their third album, Holy Fire, they had ditched all of that for huge bombast. But it was still great, “Inhaler” was my favorite song of the year, getting bigger and bigger until it somehow exploded.
I Just Read About That... 