At this point, Foals have settled into their role as alternative-radio festival stalwarts. Ever since the grimy riffs and macho vocals of Holy Fire lead single “Inhaler,” they’ve shown increasing comfort with their U2-sized sound. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—the build of oft-synched signature song “Spanish Sahara” remains so stirring that its replicants, like “Late Night” and “Sunday,” soar by association. Even if March’s Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1 was too cluttered to recapture the intimacy of “Sahara,” unexpected detours like the sparse “Cafe D’Athens” and chaotic rave-up “In Degrees” broke through the murky production. Part 2, the band promised, would be heavier still—but mostly it continues the now-standard Foals album formula, dividing its tracklist into Aggressive, Funky, and Somber. It’s not a complement to its predecessor so much as just another collection of Foals songs.

Besides, it hardly makes sense to differentiate between a rock and a pop album when every instrument is reduced to overcompressed mush. The band’s brash self-production blows up their sound until all definition is lost. The most disappointing casualty is Jack Bevan’s drumming—once the backbone of Foals’ music, he now sounds buried beneath atmospheric synths and guitars. Not that he has a lot to do: First single “Black Bull” is rhythmically identical to “What Went Down,” second single “The Runner” mimics “Inhaler,” and so on. “Like Lightning” plays like the kind of utilitarian blues-rock that music directors reach for when the Black Keys aren’t in the licensing budget.

Foals are most interesting when exploring new territory. While Part 1 shined in its homages to In Rainbows-era Radiohead, Part 2 harks back further to the progressive rock of the ’70s and ’80s. “10,000 Feet” is a half-time Rush homage, down to a repeating “Tom Sawyer” synth. The album’s back half recalls the post-Peter Gabriel, pre-Abacab Genesis, a band that balanced technical prowess with surprisingly poppy melodies. Genesis also evolved from eccentric outsiders to pop stars, and while Foals are too self-serious to embrace the style’s campier elements (leave that to their smarter, more irreverent tourmates Everything Everything), they seem to have tapped an unexpected wellspring. For all their posturing about making a record that “really resonated with the current time,” they’re more at home in old-fashioned prog.

The lyrical content, meanwhile, remains virtually unchanged between the two records. This band is famous for its energy, not its insight, and you’d be hard-pressed to hear the political subtext Foals say they’d like to impart. The band describes “Black Bull” as “a conflicted diary of masculine confusion and negative tendencies”; the actual chorus goes, “We not playing around/The black bull’s in town.” Even an intriguing turn of phrase like “turn me into a wedding ring” turns out to be a thuddingly literal reference to a more interesting story: Mexican architect Luis Barragán, whose ashes were turned into a diamond more than 25 years after his death. “Dreaming Of” is made up of references to other, better songs (“you’re dancing on your own,” “you’re always crashing that same car,” “there’s always something in the way”), but at least the magnet-poetry approach feels like a deliberate character study of someone obsessed with looking back instead of facing reality.

Rather than forming the second half of a complete statement, Part 2 struggles to differentiate itself. Even with the occasional continuity—like when the earlier “Surf Pt. 1” pays off on Part 2’s penultimate “Into the Surf”—this album could have arrived first with few alterations. “Neptune” and “Dreaming Of” will slot nicely into live performances, but they’re surrounded by songs too effortful to be filler and too unmemorable to be worthwhile. “The defining record of our career, I think we’ve still got it in us,” frontman Yannis Philippakis recently admitted to Dork, but Foals’ career-defining statement is less likely to be a new record than a playlist of all their singles. It’s hard not to lose patience as they trudge towards that album, promising they’re getting closer while moving in place.

Buy: Rough Trade

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