Album Review: Wild Beasts - Smother

Irish playwright Samuel Beckett once remarked: "James Joyce tries to put everything in; I try to take everything out." On their debut, 2008's Limbo, Panto, Cumbrian quartet Wild Beasts were closer to the James Joyce end of that creative spectrum, seemingly throwing everything they could lay their hands on at their frenetic record. By contrast, album number three sees Hayden Thorpe and his droogs pulling off something of a Sam Beckett, stripping back their sound to its bare bones. Where such a stylistic shift might get the better of lesser indie outfits, Smother marks a new high-point on the career path of one of Britain's most effervescent bands. Sophomore LP Two Dancers had already shown Wild Beasts to be capable of making bold leaps forward; now they’ve produced something of a masterpiece.

'Lion’s Share', the opening track here, sets the tone right away: the band's sound is scaled down to include just a keyboard pulse, a rolling piano motif and vocals; pattering drums eventually kick in. Against this sparse backdrop, Thorpe details a nightmarish and disturbingly one-sided sexual encounter: "Do I pull you out or do I let you sink? / I wait until you're woozy, I won't know until you're limp...". Whereas previously the singer might have bordered on flippancy (on Two Dancers' lead single 'Hooting and Howling', for instance), here he acknowledges the depravity: "It's a terrible scare / But that's why the dark is there / So you don't have to see what you can't bear."

So, yes, this is a band still very much obsessed with pleasures of the flesh, and here they continue to write about the darker side of this topic with literary flair. The lyrics are perhaps a shade more opaque than on previous outings, almost as if the details are too sordid to fully divulge. The band have acknowledged the influence of English classics such as Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is referenced (along with Hamlet) on 'Bed of Nails'. There’s a lingering sadness making its presence felt too: as Thorpe laments, on 'Loop The Loop', "Design of desire / Means all that the heart requires / Is what it can't recognise", we're reminded that this sex lark - in spite of there being two people involved - can frequently be a lonely old business.

Musically speaking, Smother's glassy arrangements are a perfect fit, creating an atmosphere of high-wire tension. Gone are the histrionics of Limbo..., and left in their place is a weird, eerie beauty: 'Albatross' is a gorgeous, aching sigh of a song, while album-closer - and standout - 'End Come Too Soon' (you hardly need me to tell you what it’s about) represents an indisputable career high-watermark, its hypnotic allure teased out beyond seven minutes, with not a single note being put to waste.

Up until now, almost all commentary on Wild Beasts has tended to focus on their lead vocalist’s extraordinary falsetto - and indeed, any band would kill for such an instrument; however, at the band's mesmerising Dublin gig last year, this listener came away thinking that Thorpe was perhaps not even the best singer among the four members, and that Tom Fleming’s husky baritone was every bit as potent a vox. It’s this sort of ridiculous surfeit of talent that gives Wild Beasts a clear advantage over their contemporaries – happily for us, it's one they’re very much determined to press home.