Since their tricksier, punk-funk party days, Foals have beefed up a great deal, amassing festival headline slots and a reputation for swirling emotional heft. Their fourth effort strives to retain the band’s considerable rhythmic nous while further amplifying the bombast. What results is partially successful – the pace and punch of the title track, for instance, with its nagging sneer of a chorus, the sense that producer James Ford has tweaked Foals’ ratio of riffs-to-electronics very nicely on tracks like Birch Tree – and partially not. Although closing track A Knife in the Ocean meditates on growing older and the impermanence of things, the song’s desperation to attain epicness undercuts the gravitas of singer Yannis Philippakis’s future-fear.
