Foals / Everything Everything @ The SSE Hydro, 12 Feb
Everything Everything are on expert form tonight, an overqualified support act blowing the lid off an almost-too-good-to-be-true bill for fans of complex art-rock. Latest record Get To Heaven may have its own highlights in studio form, but when rendered live there are surprise gems. The Wheel (Is Turning Now) bulges with muscular, centipedal legs, a bassy behemoth that not only showcases Higg’s trademark vocal dexterity but also seems to strain it, rasping as he lurches from that hummingbird falsetto down to gravelly, baritonal depths.
Regret and No Reptiles bear hidden teeth, too, and as they close with the dancey Distant Past, the diehards at the front are a stormy mess of arms, thirsty for more. It’s an unfortunately short set, predominantly Get To Heaven, barring a brief dip into Arc (Kemosabe and an infectious Cough Cough) and a sole Schoolin’ from Man Alive. Even still, the rest of the crowd seem, mostly, here for the headliners, and are criminally disinterested in the Mancunian alt-popsters, despite their fetching red jackets.
Where EE might have seemed somewhat dwarfed by this vast setting, Foals are unfazed. In fact, their laser-like focus and technical bravura are unchanged from their mid-noughties emergence; the difference now is that each of their four albums have, thus far, marked a progression in scale and concept, to the point where 2015’s What Went Down is a resonant, stadium record, channelling classic rock anthemics.
If scowling frontdude Yannis Philippakis’s rare, aluminium-bodied Travis Bean guitar (favoured by Shellac’s Steve Albini, no less) isn’t enough of a clue to his – and the band’s – commitment to high-grade, authentic rock, then the opening gnarly chords to Snake Oil should be. “Fuck yeah Glasgow, wassup!” he yowls as the reverb fades. “Here’s an old one,” he adds, introducing Antidotes’ Olympic Airways. And yet the switch from an epic WWD track to a classic hit – that addictive “Dis-a-ppear! Dis-a-ppear!” refrain chanted all the way to the back – doesn’t jar, nor does the instant funk of Holy Fire’s My Number, ably recontextualised to this new environment.
The set is well paced: grand, scuzzy peaks (Mountain At My Gates, What Went Down) and pensive troughs (Give It All, a staple Spanish Sahara), all mesmerically accompanied by dynamic, shifting LED panels (functioning as both pattern visualisers and two-tone video screens). A kinetic Providence is satanically lit by crimson lines; Inhaler is green and smoky, a scaly reptilia to match its lizard-like riffs. The visuals are at times sensual, symmetrical Rorschach blossomings, at others isolated shots of each bandmate playing frenetically, but never gimmicky or distracting. By the time we’re churning in the Two Steps, Twice dénouement, all senses have bled together with sweat and spilled cider.
Flaws are few and far between; these Oxford math-rock artisans have stepped up to an arena tour with a fully developed audiovisual experience that is, somehow, still true to their white-hot vision, striding confidently to an immortal future.