Foals engage in “not recommended behavior”, conquer Union Transfer

Foals | Photo by Cameron Pollack | cameronpollackphotography.com

I’ve given the title “best show of 2015” in my head to four shows so far this year, each one being eclipsed by the subsequent. In what will hopefully be the last of such eclipsings this year, Foals played the best set of music I’ve seen this year, and definitely one of the best I’ve ever seen.

I walked into the room at Union Transfer a bit concerned; compared to what I had heard the crowd at Terminal 5 was like the night prior, the room seemed alarmingly empty, especially for a sold out show. I had heard tell of frontman Yannis Philippakis’ on-stage / off-balcony antics, and was a little concerned at the feasibility of some of his reported stunts. Those fears were quickly dispelled as the crowd filled between set changes. The show started with “Snake Oil”, a jam whose choruses and breakdowns harken back to their Krautrock influences, and immediately got the crowd banging heads. Already, Yannis was breaking a sweat, bouncing all over the stage, accenting his guitar playing complete with a dizzying amount of spinning.

“My Number”, Foals’ most popular song, got the crowd moving as far back as the soundboard, a feat which I myself hadn’t seen since shooting The 1975 in October 2014. Throughout the set, Foals alternated between extremely danceable jams and slow burners; “Providence” nearly opened up a circle pit at several points, and “London Thunder” and “Spanish Sahara” blasted the crowd with waves upon waves of sound, as well as the saddest lyrics of the set. For the last five songs, the band left everything they had on the stage; “A Knife In the Ocean” burned in the same way that This Will Destroy You and Caspian songs do, and “Inhaler” was the start of a series of almost incomprehensible stage antics.

As I walked into the photo pit (I was to shoot the last 3.5 songs), everything became a blur; the encore featured several instances of Yannis pouring water over the front row (and the photographers), a stage dive and a half, and to top it off, Yannis leaping from the stage left balcony and onto a crowd of fans during “Two Steps, Twice” (this move was described by Union Transfer social media as “100% not recommended behavior (aka don’t even ever do this again)”). I walked out of the photo pit, damp, with no voice, and extremely energized; I didn’t just want another encore, I wanted another set.

Joining Foals were Liverpool indie-rockers Circa Waves, who warmed the crowd up with a guitar-based rock sound very similar to Foals’ own. While their set featured a lot of diminished chords and harmonic dissonance that wasn’t my absolute favorite, their set was extremely fun to watch; they had a stage presence to rival Foals’ and the drummer especially left it all out there, as is visible in the photoset below.