There was a strong element of body heat before Foals walked onstage. The sold-out crowd was abuzz about what songs they’d play, the sound guy’s choice to play Weezer and Deftones between bands, and apparently some sort of Jedi war. It seemingly took forever but around 10:15, the music silenced itself and Oxford, England’s finest (other than a certain other Oxford quintet that starts with ‘radio’ and ends with ‘head’) walked out onstage to thunderous applause.
Earlier in the night, fellow Bris Esben and the Witch played a half-hour set. I was unfamiliar with their music coming into the night, but they played a good set. They sounded good, and vocalist Rachel often looked possessed. It only took until the second song for the three band members to gather around a floor tom and cymbal at the front of the stage and bang it maniacally and rhythmically for multiple minutes. Their music consisted of a lot of guitar noise with a very heavy electronic backbeat and a girl yelling or mewling over top of it. Sometimes it sounded like HEALTH, and sometimes it sounded like newer These New Puritans. There are rather a lot of bands that make this type of female-fronted experimental art-rock nowadays and I don’t listen to enough of it to tell how Esben and the Witch separate themselves from the pack, but they must have something special for Foals to specifically pick them to open for them.
With that, it was time for the aforementioned Foals. They launched immediately into the title track from their latest album Total Life Forever. This began a theme of the night where their old songs got much better receptions than the new songs. That was a bit of a surprise since it seems like Foals fans universally liked the new album, some even more than the old one (Antidotes). This became immediately apparent when they played an old song, ‘Olympic Airways’, second and the energy level instantly increased. The highlight of the night was, predictably, their performance of ‘Spanish Sahara’ because it is their best song as well as their most epic. Speaking of epic, the ending of ‘2 Trees’ sounds epic on the album, but they somehow made it even more epic live. That was another thing, they regularly added new parts to the instrumental parts of their songs, almost always improving them. The two songs that got the biggest reaction on the night were ‘Balloons’ and ‘Red Sock Pugie’, both old songs, and it was surprising because neither of them were released as singles and neither were standout tracks on Antidotes. Yannis is the band’s singer/co-lead guitarist, and live he is cemented as the band’s definite frontman. He was the only member who said anything between songs and the only one who ever moved from the stage; he went into the crowd multiple times and at one point during the set closer (‘Two Steps, Twice’) he made it all the way to the back of the room and played while standing on the bar. Something that happened that somewhat negatively affected the set was that guitarist Jimmy had technical difficulties with his instrument throughout the second half. He had to get the guitar tech to switch/fix his guitars multiple times, but the rest of the band took this well, usually expanding the song they were playing or playing an instrumental while he was getting his problems resolved.
Overall I think the crowd was satisfied, and the general consensus was that it was a great show. Lee’s Palace is a nice venue because it doesn’t get extremely crowded or suffocatingly hot like some other places do, so it was a good place for this show to take place. The volume of the show also wasn’t extremely loud, it didn’t really cause too much ear ringing in comparison to other shows. So, until probably 2 years from now when Foals come back, this has quenched our thirst.
-Scott Kendall
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