Foals

Bit of a crush at an absolutely packed O2 Academy, Bristol for Foals last night. Haven't emerged from a gig so sweaty and beer-covered for yonks. Foals have been touring their mercury-nominated album Total Life Forever for a while now and although the music was played efficiently and effectively with bags of energy they seem in need of some new material.

I can't begin to imagine how dull it must get to play the same set for two years and, if suffering from this, they hid it reasonably well. I don't think most of the crowd realised that the frenzy they were getting in was not being induced by the music but a desire for frenzy whatever.

It's that strange combo of mid-tempo, rhythmically-pounding misery rock which had all the depressed students singing along (often in the wrong places), chatting and texting during the quieter instrumental breaks and photographing each other. Think of a Big Country/Editors/Talking Heads vibe and you'd be there.

Singer and guitarist Yannis Philippakis is a moody vocalist but a poor between-tune communicator. His nod in the direction of charisma was to go walkabout to the balconies towards the end of the show. Not spontaneous. He did it in Edinburgh too according to the Scotsman review.

Three stars.

Earlier Toro Y Moi had entertained us with some lovely soundscapes from his keyboard/bass/drums combo. Sounded interesting. Will investigate.

A lot of my reviewing these days seems to suggest, as I read it back, that I am too old for club gigs. Maybe true but given the demographic of the rock/pop audience they probably ought to want to keep us