Holy Foals

While there are lots of bands dealing in either danceable rock or navel-gazing pop, few bands combine the two quite like Foals. On Holy Fire, the third album from the English band, the post-punk revival is given a newfound sense of depth, creating songs that are rhythmic enough to draw listeners, but hypnotic enough to leave listeners lost in their wide-open spaces. This combination of atmosphere and momentum find Foals growing out of the shadows of titans like the Talking Heads and into a spaced-out, dance-punk niche that's all their own. Though a lot of the band's charm comes from the delicate interplay between the guitars and keyboards, the real star of the album comes by way of the massive, stadium-ready "Inhaler," which takes the sparkling, slow build used throughout the album and turns it on its ear with an eruption of massively fuzzy, Muse-esque guitars…

It may be fourty years since Neu! became the godfathers of Krautrock, but their influence is still going strong - at least that's what a new compilation hopes to prove. A plethora of stars have stepped up to the plate for a disc not of covers, but of songs influenced by the German legends - and that distinction is precisely what saves "Brand Neu!" from being just another generic celebration. These days every granny and her goldfish are dabbling in electro, but it wasn't so back in the 70s, when Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger split from Kraftwerk and started making some of the most exciting stuff to come out of Germany, well… ever. In doing so, they influenced Bowie, Radiohead and a lot of people in between…