Anti-Buzz & 'Antidotes': Foals

FOALS AREN'T QUITE your typical British buzz-band.

For instance, while lead singer and guitarist Yannis Philippakis sounds as if he would rather swallow hemlock than listen to a Stone Roses record, he's happy to heap laurels on Sweep the Leg Johnny — a defunct Chicago math-rock band that's about as far from the pages of NME as Pete Doherty is from sober living.

But Foals have at least two things in common with their chart-topping peers. First of all, they have a hit — the band's debut record, "Antidotes," hit No. 3 in the U.K. national charts.

Second of all, Foals' music is kind of moody.

To record "Antidotes" (Sub Pop), Foals traveled from their home in Oxford, England, to New York City in order to work with TV on the Radio's David Sitek.

The result is a pop record, but an ambitious one.

The CD is something like if the new wavey guitar rock of Echo and the Bunnymen was combined with the sound of African trance-clangers Konono No.1. Guitars tick out exacting patterns and the drums curve dance beats into stop-start rhythms that won't be completely unfamiliar to anybody who paid attention to the Dischord label during the early '00s.

Philippakis admits that the decision to travel abroad was to ease the band's rather tense and critical working dynamic: "The further we were out of our element, the better."

But Foals were also drawn to producer Sitek's temperament and layered, quasi-psychedelic sound.

"We wanted to work with a big, extreme presence. We all admired him and any antagonism that he gave us was very positive," said Philippakis. "Dave had this mantra of, 'What would Jimi Hendrix do if he had ProTools now?'"

But when asked whether he's completely pleased with the final product, the singer nervously chuckled a little bit.

"No. Not entirely," he said. "If it had been up to me ... one of the fonts [on the album cover] is annoying; the mix could have been different."

According to Philippakis, Foals are also ill at ease with being adored by the British media.

"The way we grew up listening to music — we never read NME. But the media picked us. They do it at such an early stage, it's so weird and shallow," he said. "Bands from the magazines — we don't really hang out with them. They're boring."

But if there's one thing Foals are content with, it's the amount of success they've seen.

"We've already far exceeded any of our expectations for being in the band," he said.

» Rock & Roll Hotel, 1353 H St. NE; with Tereu Tereu and Roma Condor, Wed., 8:30 p.m., $12; 202-388-7625.

Written by Express contributor Aaron Leitko

Photos courtesy Foals