These days, you can’t move for grandiose, album-length state-of-the-nation addresses. Everyone’s at it. Grime MCs rap them, singer-songwriters earnestly intone them, latterday punk bands shout them while wearing only their underpants, mainstream pop stars employ armies of Swedes to write them on their behalf.
You might have expected rock and pop music to respond to the ongoing lunacy of current events with a series of short, sharp reactions. But a certain verbosity, a desire to make large, imposing statements, seems to have taken precedence. Who would have thought that the rise of rightwing populism would turn artists not into the 21st-century equivalents of the Sex Pistols, Public Enemy or the Ghost Town-era Specials, but Jethro Tull circa Thick As a Brick? Given this, there is something oddly impressive about Foals’ desire to make a state-of-the-nation address even more grandiose than everyone else’s.
Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is not a double album but an album in two parts, which somehow feels more wilfully lavish and ostentatious, and puts it in a very slender pantheon within rock history. It breathes the same rarefied air as the Kinks’ Preservation Acts 1 and 2, Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I & II, Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Works Vols 1 & 2 and Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage Acts I, II & III. They seem to have missed a trick by labelling the two albums as “parts” rather than “acts”, as Frank Zappa did – and indeed by failing to open them with an 18-minute piano concerto in three movements, as ELP did. But somewhere in the hereafter, you suspect Messrs Zappa and Emerson – men who could be accused of many things, but never of taking themselves insufficiently seriously – are nodding their approval at Foals’ explanation for the whole concept: “Our creative desire and ambition has not been able to be conveyed on a 40-minute, 10-track album”.
It’s hard not to applaud that remark. Fear of social-media backlash has led to a catastrophic shortage of rock bands saying ludicrous, self-regarding things in recent years. And, in fairness, it was hard not to applaud at least some of Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1. As is the way with Foals, it wasn’t quite as clever as it thought it was, but you could see why it ended up nominated for a Mercury prize. There was something compelling about its slippery progress from post-punk funk to smartphone-torches-on arena anthemics. Its successor is touted as a more straightforward rock album, the lyrics tracking the loosely hopeful, nature-prevails aftermath of the apocalyptic scenario conjured on Part 1. And despite the presence of a portentous synth prelude and a brief, ambient piano interlude, that’s largely what it sounds like. The riffs are frequently noisy and vaguely Zeppelin-ish, the drums similarly slip their moorings from the agitated indie-disco chatter of Dreaming Of towards When the Levee Breaks pounding. On 10,000 Ft, they drag the song away from an intro that unexpectedly recalls the Stone Roses and take it somewhere heavier: a pleasing and surprising shift in gear.
Whether you think setting Black Bull’s critique of swaggering machismo to swaggering, grunting garage rock is a witty act of détournement or a pretty bare-faced case of trying to have one’s cake and eat it is up to you, but there’s no getting around the fact that the end result is potent. Elsewhere, the album slathers on poppy choruses, as on The Runner and Wash Off, and breaks ranks on the concluding 10,000 Ft and Neptune. The former is just gorgeous – a mid-tempo stadium rock ballad so smothered in echo it takes on a weird quality all of its own – while the latter lasts 10 minutes: confoundingly, for those of us who tend to the belief that less is usually more, it’s the best track on the album, its shifts from melancholy to muscular genuinely warranting its length.
All of this is well done. The album’s problem, such as it is, lurks in the gulf between its advance billing and its contents. If you’re led to expect a burst of wildly adventurous creativity so boundless that it simply cannot be contained within the kind of running time that, say, the Beatles or Stevie Wonder somehow managed to cope with on Revolver or Innervisions, it’s reasonable to feel slightly underwhelmed when the reality turns out to be something a little more prosaic: a solid 2019 rock album. What the combination of grinding riffs, commercial choruses and arena-sized ambition recalls is a cross between the Arctic Monkeys circa AM and the 1975. There’s obviously absolutely nothing wrong with sounding like that, but the sense that it isn’t quite what it thinks it is hangs heavy over Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 2.
This week Alexis listened to
Article 54: Freedom of Movement
The incongruity and satire behind Article 54’s Brexit-themed disco album is sharp and funny, but its real genius lurks in its music: a fabulous, unerringly accurate homage to disco at its most luxurious.
