91Èȱ¬

'Balloons' just goes to show how wrong you can be, even when you're right. This is the third Foals single. It is sonically not a million miles away from Bloc Party in the way that the sea is not a million miles away from the beach, but it really doesn't matter. Foals are taking Bloc's pure, crystalline rock perfection and smearing their very human muck all over it.

So, where Kele and co would create towering glassy structures out of massive echoing guitar riffage, Foals use their instruments in a far less architectural way - their two guitars writhe around each other like a mongoose and a snake, sometimes together, sometimes apart. And the foul blasts of foghorn sax and atonal synth add a certain vulgar, sulphurous gust to proceedings which would never suit Bloc's icy modernism.

And rather than tell a story or provoke debate, 'Balloons' seems to have been created as a rallying cry, a way of dancing people together, and then making them all yell along with the band in a big communal jitterfest (and because this is a utopian call-to-arms, no-one gets elbowed in the face, no matter how wildly the scenesters are dancing).

So, in the end, the only points of overwhelming similarity are Yannis's very Kele yelp and that both bands are blessed with astonishingly good drummers. And that's not really worth picking fault with.

Mind you, the bands that Foals get excited about had better sound VERY DIFFERENT INDEED, or there's going to be trouble...

Download: Out now
CD Released: December 10th

(Fraser McAlpine)