Indian summer is in full swing in LA. The heavier portion of festival season is over and now bands that have traveled along the fest circuit all summer are returning for one final foul swoop of touring locally before the year ends. The best way to beat the scorching heat Tuesday night was to cool off inside Hollywood Palladium’s air conditioned ballroom and ring one’s ears into oblivion with the wailing sounds of Foals taking the venue by storm. One thing about this quintet – anticipation is the name of their game. Foals know how to build a song and how to build a set that ultimately delivers the the most impactful music experience. They approach the stage like Ike and Tina, starting off “nice and easy” and finishing “nice and rough.”
The live translation intensifies the validity of this point as they start their set with “Prelude” from their 2013 album Holy Fire. Using a purely instrumental intro wets the audience’s whistle just enough to swarm the stage. They waste no time getting to the new stuff by moving right into “Snake Oil,” revealing a grittier side of their sound and waking up the sleepy yawners at the back of the room with some raunchy guitar hooks loud enough to make the dance floor vibrate. Frontman Yannis Philippakis is known for his fearless approach to performing and wily antics of jumping into or throwing water onto the crowd. However, he keeps his cool for the majority of the set until the bitter end of “Inhaler” when he hops onto the pit and walks a few feet in while fans below bolster him. His surprise attack is twofold as he fully dives onto onlookers and surfs during the encore. He has plenty of time to roam about because they stretch the instrumental side of “What Went Down” out so far that it turns the beginning of the song into a psychedelic adventure so drawn out that the audience is ready to burst when the chorus finally hits. A quick and raucous “Two Steps, Twice,” opens the dancing floodgates, getting every last body in the building to move. With the notion that there is an indefinite amount of time until the English rockers return to LA, one can’t help but feel a loss at the night’s end.
After releasing their fourth album What Went Down last summer, it became blatantly clear that Foals still have not learned how to take a break. Virtually a new album every two years left little time for relaxation, but they somehow overcame the obstacles of the road and tour life, and they continued to release albums that got consecutively better. The only frustration here was that Tuesday night’s lineup was split three ways. Consequently, Foals got less time to explore their burgeoning music catalog as they kept their set confined within a third of the night’s time. They next head Southeast to perform at the famed Austin City Limits festival, also known as the Coachella of Texas, this coming weekend. Here’s hoping that once they wrap up the year they keep up momentum and crank out another album soon.
Setlist
Prelude
Snake Oil*
Olympic Airways
My Number
Providence
Give It All*
Mountain at My Gates*
Spanish Sahara
Red Rocks Pugie
Late Night
A Knife in the Ocean*
Inhaler
Encore
What Went Down*
Two Steps, Twice
*from What Went Down
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