MUSIC REVIEWS

FOALS - EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST - PART 2

Although cut from the same

Grade A cloth, the follow-up to

Everything Not Saved Will Be

Lost - Part 1, manages to usurp its predecessor - and that’s no easy feat.

The album is a powerful eruption of what we have come to expect from Foals of late: intense, foreboding rock tracks, with a couple of more melodic and upbeat tunes to lighten the mood. Every song is a triumph; you’ll find no fillers here: even the two short instrumental offerings, Red Desert and Ikaria, bring to mind an empty but beautiful wasteland that lays waiting for the four-piece from Oxford to descend upon with thrashing guitars, foot-stomping riffs and Yannis Philippakis’ melancholic, haunting vocal.

Lead single, the heavy, rhythmic Runner, is an advantageous starting point from which the band start sprinting, and don’t stop. Black Bull, another rock-driven track, bulldozes into the senses like the animal itself. The more upbeat Wash Off takes the band’s trademark sound to a happy place, while Dreaming Of has more of an undulating feel, though who can complain while joyously trapped by the swell of the tide? The calming presence of Neptune brings the album to an end, a ten-minute long emotive closer to an exhilarating ride. One thing is for sure; Foals keep getting better and better, this album proving the pinnacle of their career thus far.

JIMMY EAT WORLD - SURVIVING

You only have to read the title of Jimmy Eat World’s 10th album - Surviving - to get a feel for its topic of choice. The band, once pioneers of the so-called emo scene, are 25 years into their musical lives, while former label mates and rivals such as Good Charlotte and AFI have disappeared from view. Jimmy Eat World are not a band known for venturing outside the hook-laden guitar sound they helped carve out but on this record they reach for the future by turning back to the past. “It’s funny... With this album we’re listening to the same shit we listened to in Junior High”, says the band’s drummer Zach Lind.

That music - the heavy metal of Quiet Riot, Ratt and Motley Crue - seeps into Surviving and adds a punkrock edge that has been missing from their recent records. There’s even a political slant to some of the music - Criminal Energy alludes to Donald Trump’s narcissism - while frontman Jim Adkins provides his trademark soaring vocals.

Surviving is unlikely to surprise fans of Jimmy Eat World. But it might make them fall back in love with them.

ROB HALFORD - CELESTIAL

A Christmas album, in October, from Judas Priest’s stalwart frontman? Yes, Halford - with family and friends - is thumbing through and adding to the Yuletide songbook. Of the four original compositions, the instrumental title track leads into standout rocker Donner And Blitzen while Morning Star is an unlikely ballad, though not a patch on ridiculous closer Protected By The Light. The highlights lie on the traditional numbers, including a magnificently melodramatic Away In A Manger and seven-minute Good King Wenceslas. Only intermittently does Halford truly let the heavy metal loose, most spectacularly with the driving riff and spiralling solo of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and the guttural fa-la-las on a skull-crushing Deck The Halls. A similarly thunderous Hark! The Herald Angels Sing segues straight into a perfectly