LogFAQs > #957106431

45. Foals Spanish Sahara (2010)
from the album Total Life Forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYoINidnLRQ

Key lyrics:
Forget the horror here
Leave it all down here
Its future rust, its future dust

Spanish Sahara is the slowest of slow builds, a creeping work of existential dread that builds from a quiet post-rock ambience to a furious, arena-sized rocker. Though I immediately find myself drawing comparisons to Led Zeppelins Stairway to Heaven, there is as much of Jefferson Airplanes White Rabbit few other songs feel like a singular, gigantic crescendo. Spanish Sahara starts so low as to force you to bump the volume up, with a change so gradual youre likely to have it blasting from your speakers without noticing. What better way to represent the act of trying and failing to get a horrific image out of your head?

Yannis Philippakis plays his part well, a wispy voice in the distance. Even as the instrumentation grows around him, he captures an air of fragility. The synthesizers build like rolling waves behind him, pushing him higher while simultaneously threatening to drown him out. By the end, he changes his position from the horrified to the horror itself, finally matching the volume of the instrumentation right as it reaches its peak. As the lyrics fall into a loop, they suggest a numbing cycle, a horror passed down from one man to another.

Spanish Sahara is a seven-minute musical odyssey, one that grows on me with every listen. Plenty of artists have attempted a colossal slow build, but few manage such thorough success from the sparse, glacial opening to the dense crescendo back down to the muted outro, this feels as singular as it does expansive. By treating its big finale as a dreadful culmination instead of a cathartic release, Spanish Sahara leaves a devastating impact.

---

My top 100 games (with write-ups): https://foolfantastic.com/top-100-video-games-project/