Music Mouth: A Personal Favourite: Foals - Spanish Sahara

Music Mouth

A Personal Favourite: Foals - Spanish Sahara

I have wanted to write a little blog post about this for a while because it keeps cropping up when I put my iPod on shuffle. This blog post is about Foals’ track ‘Spanish Sahara’ from their second album Total Life Forever.

There’s something extremely entrancing about this song; maybe it’s the way that it manages to take me into my own world when I have it blasting from speakers that surround me. It is no wonder that people were taking cocaine whilst I watched them perform at Reading Festival in 2010, they were enhancing that zoning out feeling that illegal substances can create which I believe is a similar effect of this song. The entrapment this song creates is perhaps a downfall for when I’m listening to it and driving along the fast lane of the M25.

This song starts off very quietly and timid, in fact it’s so faint that the first near-minute of the song is almost unheard. ‘Spanish Sahara’ then builds into something demanding that eagerly tugs at you, drawing you right in to power of this song’s almighty peak as Yanis Philipakkis repeatedly sings the words “I’m the fury in your head, I’m the fury in your bed. I’m the ghost in the back of your head.” It’s not long after these words that he then exits the song, leaving the reverberating loop pedal and repetitive drum beat to lead you into a stunning soundscape as you await his return and it’s the very loops in this song that make it so enchanting.

The track is then tied together with a sense of equilibrium as the sounds and instruments die out to just a faint background noise just like it begins, signalling it's completion with a haunting end. It leaves an impact that wouldn’t be left from a recent single such as 'My Number' but don't get me wrong I still love that song, it's just different. I always think that some of the directions that 'Spanish Sahara' took went in a similar one to that of Radiohead.

This is a song that I’ve regrettably never been able to witness live as I split their set at Reading with Paramore’s. I don’t think that any song from their newest album Holy Fire will ever captivate or blow me away as much as this track did.