Whichever way you look at it, the apocalypse as entertainment is a tough sell. Usually the domain of bands from an Oslo cellar named after something in the Old Testament, Yannis Phillipakis took the impending ecological/cultural/technological crisis as read and turned it into a pair of ambitious concept albums, of which this is the second and final.
Part of being one of the country’s biggest bands is in adeptly realising how much license you posess for experimentation. Whereas the first release took a more pragmatic view of what could be brought to the table and not confuse, here the mania of Black Bull shows us that consensus is now someone else’s problem.
Is this a new Foals, driven by primal fear, or just one in a slightly less comfortable skin? Although there are other snatches of leash-off power over grain – notably on 10,000 Feet and The Runner – the answer is the latter. If anything, once the paranoia evaporates the real feature is the album’s lack of extremes, ten minute closer Neptune the sort of epic peak and trough journey they’ve been delivering in one format or another for more than a decade.
Phillipakkis uses Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 2 to both prove his and Foals creative resourcefulness and fulfill their ambitions; it’s a test passed, although the exact question they were trying to answer remains obscured. How it will be judged in years to come – and whether we’ll all be saved or lost – remains anyone’s guess.
You can read the full review here.
The Voice Of Unreason 
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