Foals - Antidotes

If the Enemy are at the back of class, twanging the girls' bras and congratulating each other on how working class they are, honest, then Foals are down the front, hands thrust towards the heavens, sneering through their fringes at the less-enlightened ranks behind them. Foals think they have the answer, and woe betide anyone who may not appreciate just how damn clever it is.

Self-diagnosed intellectualism is distasteful at the best of times, but for an indie band it's near-fatal. Even for one who, like Foals, are pretty good. And herein lays the problem. You get the impression that, to Yannis and co, being described as a 'pretty good indie band' is as repugnant as a state school education. Unfortunately, that's precisely what they are.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Parts of this album are truly terrific – the cataclysmic bottle-up-and-explode build up halfway through Two Steps, Twice, the knife-edge staccato riff of Heavy Water dropping out and making way for solitary bursts of brass, Olympic Airways' gentle harmonic shimmer demonstrating that melody isn't always their secondary consideration.

The difficulty for Foals is that, from the way their interviews set them up as some kind of revolutionary musical force, striking a blow for long forgotten innovation, Antidotes isn't enough. The much-vaunted Afrobeat influence turns out to be a few Antibalas' trumpeters tagged on the end of a handful of tracks, adding little, and certainly not playing anything resembling Fela Kuti et al. You get the impression that they're there just to provide the band with the opportunity to say in interviews that they know what Afrobeat is.

And there are times when the ceaseless hi-hat 16ths become so oppressively monotonous that you long for something, anything, to break it all up and prevent the inevitable return to yet another bout of 'boom-tish-boom-tish'. It is instructive that the best moments of the album arrive when Foals abandon their 4/4 straitjacket and let their songs breathe and develop naturally, without immediately lapsing back into the easy option of breakneck off-beat cymbals. These moments show that they do have the ability to pull off the inventive musicality they constantly proclaim their own. The question is now more about bravery, about going to the places they find uncomfortable. That alone will put Foals in the elevated position they so clearly cherish.