Foals - Total Life Forever (2010)

Foals are not your typical indie-rock band. They know what they're doing, and they're doing it with style.

Hailing from crappy England, these guys released their first LP, Antidotes, in 2008. Sure, that was a really good album, and it did receive mostly positive reviews. The band had great potential, yeah, but it was too early for them to show us what they could really do. That's why no one expected this album to be this good. Two years later, they released the beast. The band itself said that this album sounds "like the dream of an eagle dying". How fucking awesome is that?

Doubtful at first, after hearing a lot of people praising this I loaded up Grooveshark and pressed play. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised. This is awesomely crafted indie-rock with dashes of math-rock and experimental stuff that manages to get your attention. What is math-rock, you ask? Well, you probably don't care. But I'm going to tell you, anyway. It's just a fancy term used to describe rock with weird time signatures and odd rhythmic structures. Yeah, it's really hard to play math-rock, and I must say their guitarist is great.

He's the guy on the right...uhm, trust me on this one, he plays that guitar like no other.

The album culminates with Spanish Sahara, a track that should tell you if you're going to like the album or not. This is what the lead singer said about the song:

"It has no real relevance to the real Spanish Sahara, which none of us have been to. It's kind of an imaginary place - somewhere that's quite nightmarish and ravaged. It's like a desolate landscape and the whole song is like, getting over a trauma, but the trauma doesn't go away and it multiplies from one into a bunch of furies, which was kinda to do with the Greek myths of the furies, who would haunt families and generations."

Doesn't it sound interesting? I think so, yeah. So with a great progression of harmonies, a matured sound and first-class lyrics, Foals is a band that makes you ask - Why haven't I heard this before?