Total Life Forever

Submitted by the panel on 16 February 2013 - 10:27pm

Cover:

Artist:

Foals

album-ID:

a_77

Nationality:

Year:

2 010

Release-year:

0000

Num-of-tracks:

Track-listing:

Blue Blood*Miami*Total Life Forever*Black Gold*Spanish Sahara*This Orient*Fugue*After Glow*Alabaster*2 Trees*What Remains

Length-in-mins:

Nominator:

Bean

meeting-ID:

m_29

Now-num:

Spotify-URL:

0TN9abNwnSnMW3jxw6uIeL

Grooveshark-URL:

Total+Life+Forever/4147320

Short-title:

totalLife

nominator-ID:

u_43

Meeting-date:

Friday, 25 June 2010

MusicBrainz-URL:

d538df74-a31e-4aa8-ad10-ffb125db6725

Wikipedia-URL:

Total_Life_Forever

Spotify-link-type:

album

Metacritic-URL:

total-life-forever/foals

Discogs-URL:

Foals-Total-Life-Forever/master/248988

Allmusic-URL:

total-life-forever-mw0001979439

BBC-URL:

h9m5

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reviewers-IDs data

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72

reviewed by

Richard Norbury
68

reviewed by

Glyn Lewis

Their future’s not what it used to be

1-5

4-9-11

A number of songs have a new wave, white funk, choppy guitar feel to them, particularly at the start of the album. This sound was a bit reminiscent of Talking Heads, XTC and 80s King Crimson – there were some nice bits in here – but the rhythms were pretty uptight and relentless. On the fifth song, Spanish Sahara, they slowed it down a bit and that was a relief to me, eventually a break from the jerky, endless, angular rhythms, although this was possibly a song or two too late. Towards the end of the album it started to veer towards a turgid, stadium rock sound, with echoey picked guitar. He has a slightly shouty vocal style that I don’t enjoy so much and, from what I could pick out, there are some not so great lyrics. “The future’s not what it used to be” is quite a nice phrase but it’s not theirs and was well over used. "It’s your heart / that gives you this western feeliing" was another one that was repeated ad infinitum. Hmmm..

After Glow is probably a fairly representative example of the album as a whole, exciting percussive rhythms, with some nice drama built up in the developing guitar patterns, but which is spoilt by an awkward sounding vocal refrain, behind which the rest of the band seem to be struggling to decide what to play.

I quite enjoyed their first album but this one I’m not so sure about. Unfortunately it’s the slightly unpleasantly skewed vocal lines that stick in my head after hearing it and not all the very worthy rhythmic invention.
55

reviewed by

Neil Hornsey

8

This album takes so many plays to get to the point where you can remember it, you wonder if it's worth the effort. There is a good sound, and some good songs, in there somewhere, but ultimately it's just not enough to warrant further effort. It just sounds too much like too many other things to stand out.
50

reviewed by

Matthew Baker

The Futures's not worth shit if this is it

This band are really popular, which I don't really get. They were interesting when they started out and were a bit more math rock, but seem to have sold their souls for some Killers / Coldplay type blandness and an album seemingly designed for playing on large festival stages.