With the music industry emerging from the circus of festival season, the talk this week has been about one thing – Foals.
The Oxford indie-math-funk-rockers released their new album What Went Down, to general acclaim on Friday, reminding us that they are among the very best rock bands in the world.
To hometown fans, who have shared their journey – from those frenzied early hometown sweat-pit gigs at The Cellar to the planet’s biggest festivals and even the Royal Albert Hall – it is a gratifying experience, and one we should all celebrate.
The weekend saw the lads delight audiences with ‘secret’ (or at least, unannounced) sets at Reading and Leeds Festivals, and, as we go to press they are heading to their spiritual home, Oxford’s Cowley Road, to sign albums for hundreds of adoring hometown fans.
The album is a triumph of aggressive, swaggering, cerebral post-rock and is destined to top the album chart this week – something that was ever-so-narrowly denied 2013’s Holy Fire, which went in at number two.
Catch them live on tour in November, including an appearance at the Margate Dreamland By The Sea event on September 14.
Another local band causing much excitement are indie-pop favourites Alphabet Backwards, who are midway through their mission to write and record three separate releases in a year – without the help of anything as frivolous as studios or labels.
The five-piece are doing this with what they’d admit is a ferocious work ethic and some decent home recording equipment installed in a farmhouse in deepest Devon. Their second release is a three-track EP called Book About Foxes, which is out on September 25.
For the third and final release we will just have to wait until March.
The band also tell us they have achieved the rare honour of having a Japanese Alphabet Backwards covers band. Banzai!
Follow them at facebook.com/alphabackwards.
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