There must be a book in the offices of major record labels called How To Make Difficult Artists Easy and Sell Them to The World. When Oxford’s Foals released their 2008 debut Antidotes they were the musical equivalent of the Times crossword: abstract, challenging, rewarding of perseverance and not about to dumb down for anyone.
However, there is a lucrative hinterland between impenetrable maths-rock and pure pop and whether through the looming horror of mortgage repayments or the intoxication of thousands of people singing back at you some guff you wrote in a few minutes while sitting on the toilet, Foals have headed straight for that hinterland. Now they look like joining their fellow former alternative types, Coldplay and Snow Patrol, in the tasteful stadium rock market, ditching early depth for an album of pure commercial ambition hiding under a cloak of art.
What Went Down comes with references that are comforting to middle-class audiences who like hummable pop but would be embarrassed buying, say, the new Rita Ora album. Foals recorded it in Saint Rémy-de Provence, where Van Gogh painted The Starry Night from the window of his asylum bedroom after slicing off his ear.
The lyrics are eloquent enough as long as you don’t think about them too deeply. “I fell for a girl with a port wine stain,” groans Yannis Philippakis on the festival-friendly title track. “I knew her initials but never her name.” The girl with the port wine stain might be pleased to know she’s attracted the singer of a famous rock group, until she wonders why he couldn’t even be bothered to find out what she’s called.
“When I feel low, you show me a signpost to where I should go,” he sings on the Coldplay-like Mountain at My Gates. At a guess, that signpost reads: “Headline slot at a major rock festival.”
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There’s no shame in making music that appeals to millions around the world, as everyone from the Beatles to Taylor Swift has proved, but an interesting band has turned boring, not to mention grandiose and lacking in humour. Birch Tree has a singalong moment in its choral line “come see me by the river, see how the time flows”, but you have to sit through ponderous Eighties-style keyboard rock to get to it.
The funk of Night Swimmers is not livened up by Philappakis’s less than inspired words about swimming in a lagoon under a blue moon, and Snake Oil is a dangerous title for a humdrum composition hiding under a bunch of weird effects from producer James Ford.
There are two great songs buried on this disappointing set. London Thunder is a ballad about the ennui of returning home that has real feeling, while A Knife in the Ocean is ghostly and unusual; an epic with a sense of mystery. Otherwise, What Went Down is the sound of a band being primed for worldwide acceptance by becoming as exciting as a tax return.
(Transgressive / Warner Bros)