Tangled Foals Rock

What is the style of this band? There are as many opin­ions on that as there are many music web­sites – min­imal, math rock, indie rock. Somebody even thought up such a style as dance rock. Anyway – it is really easy to enjoy them. Sounds remind of 70’s, inco­her­ent lyr­ics and weird funny mem­bers of band sets light and enjoy­able fun mood.

“We wanted to cre­ate music which would be very tech­nical, which wouldn’t be only for parties, but at the same time that would be cheer­ful and people could dance to it.” – says Yannis Philippakis (guitar/​vocals).

Band bap­tized them­selves with a name of “Foals” from a nick­name of vocal­ist Yanni, which trans­lated from Greek lan­guage means “little horse lover“. It all began in a small room which became a stu­dio. When every­one star­ted to express their thoughts and ideas, it came appar­ent that band mem­bers are very crit­ical of each other. There were con­flicts in the begin­ning, but finally they reached some res­ult – per­cus­sion, no chords, gui­tars play­ing higher than 12 fret and a little bit of syn­thes­izer. That’s how this weird and last cen­tury sound­ing band came to be. Something is wrong with those guitars.

Band’s pre­cise sound is merit of Steve Reich. It is him, who intro­duced the world with mean­ing of musical min­im­al­ism in 60’s..

I hate messy music. It is an annoy­ing thing, and it has invin­cible attrac­tion. It doesn’t inter­fere with daily life it’s just aes­thet­ics. I like music which has struc­ture, order and model. And I like when dif­fer­ent pieces of dif­fer­ent tem­plates go together weirdly. — Yannis Philippakis.

I want that words of the song would high­light the music and not other way around – when words put music into shade. Those aren’t some kind of stor­ies; those are just views, which I see in my head. The lyr­ics are pushed into the second plan, they are sep­ar­ated from the music, — says the singer.

Work is done by so called sixth band mem­ber – Tinhead. He cre­ates sur­real paint­ing for a song, shows how it should sound visu­ally. Those weird lines, retro col­ors and buzz­ing birds – all are his fault. He cuts out some­thing like soviet attrib­utes and pastes it in the back­ground of flowers. These incom­pat­ible, warped and put together again manip­u­la­tions reflect the music.

More on the band and it’s per­form­ances here.

About author:

Gintarė Žitkevičiūtė
Gintare Zitkeviciute is Art Pit’s thinker and doer. In her work practise, she values lean approach, creativity and quick decisions. She doesn't like working with random people and thinks that a team is a heart of successful project. For that reason, she carefully picks people she works with on everyday basis. She is mostly interested in innovatio... Read further >