Wild Beasts - Two Dancers

Amid the dross of UK indie-rock in 2008, Wild Beasts stood apart on their thrilling, if flawed debut, Limbo, Panto. Striking a remarkable dash, with Hayden Thorpe’s extraordinary falsetto their calling card, the Leeds-based quartet wrote songs about blokish pursuits (sex, booze and football) with literary, florid lyrics, and delivered them with a wild theatricality far beyond any of their peers. While not making a massive splash in terms of sales, they established themselves as an exotic, precociously talented group, always teetering on the verge of daftness, but perhaps the most exciting in Britain. 

The stage is set, then, for Wild Beasts to build on their momentum, and their second album delivers the goods. They’ve pared back some of the more outré elements of the debut, and the initial effect is underwhelming. You may find yourself wondering if these beasts have been tamed. Despite the opening track threatening ‘a boot up your arsehole’, on first inspection the album seems precisely the opposite. But Two Dancers comes seriously good, the band’s self-described ‘downbeat erotic music’ ultimately making its indelible mark. Less Andrew Lloyd Webber than previously, their relatively restrained new sound is built to make a lasting impression, while still sounding like no other.

If the music is a slow-burning pleasure, the lyrics are an instant knockout.  Hayden Thorpe mines a similar vein to Arctic Monkeys’ brilliant wordsmith Alex Turner, but where Turner writes in everyday prose, Thorpe’s lyrics are laden with rich imagery and internal rhyme. The sheer malevolence he conjures up is frightening – this is the sound of an urban England gone badly wrong. There’s something of A Clockwork Orange in Hooting and Howling, Thorpe depicting a “bovver-boot ballet, equally elegant and ugly”, his fighting described as “courting him in fisticuffing waltz”. Any notion that it’s all harmless fun is way off the mark: “Any rival who goes for our girls will be left thumb-sucking in terror and bereft of all coffin bearers” he sings. He really is some writer – one is left to conclude that only The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn is this good at putting savage violence to such gleaming poetry. Wild Beasts will kick you up the arse, steal your girlfriend and leave you crying out for more.