PITCHFORK 8,2 AI WILD BEASTS

“It’s about saying, are you going to come in and listen or not? Because if you’re not, we’re not going to accommodate you, to let you be part of and involved in this intimacy.” That’s Wild Beasts’ Hayden Thorpe speaking to The Quietus this week on both Smother, his band’s latest, as well as the unmanageable position in which they’ve found themselves at home in England over the years. When the relatively isolated Kendal four-piece first arrived on the scene in 2007, their brand of flamboyant, almost vaudevillian indie rock was peerless in a landscape dominated by Arctic Monkeys and post-Libertines lad rockers. Thorpe’s voice in particular– a song-carrying instrument that moves between frilly falsetto and bulldog growl– divided at most turns. You were either compelled to hang on every jagged syllable or run the other way.

And then they decided to streamline some: For the curvy art-funk of 2009’s Two Dancers, they reigned in their more baroque tendencies. Thorpe brushed his voice soft, the lower register croon of bassist Tom Fleming was worked in further to act as anchor, and a band that seemed too difficult and bizarre to shoehorn into the pop conversation was sorta kinda flirting with exactly that. Well, that’s how it looked from the outside.

Despite the many critical successes of that album, Wild Beasts have remained an act with no intention of blending in. Smother, their third full-length, is just as the above quote promises: completely uncompromising. And that’s why it succeeds. Thorpe and Co. have continued down the path of Two Dancers, paring their sound down even further. What they’re left with is naked in arrangement, nocturnal in tone, and deeply, deeply sensual. And that, actually, seems to be the “intimacy” to which Thorpe intimated in conversation with The Quietus. From the first moments of “Lion’s Share”, an opening, piano-led crescendo: “I wait until you’re woozy, I wait until you’re lame/ I take you in my mouth like the lion takes its game.” It’s a line he delivers in a very controlled, sympathetic manner, one that would have stumbled out of his mouth four years ago.

And while the dimpled electronic grooves of Smother do make for close listening, Thorpe’s overtly sexual couplets provide a slinky analog to the sonics at play. In “Bed of Nails”, a melodic marvel in its own right, he uses a skittering bridge to proffer a few grunts, howls, and moans. But again, what makes this all work so well is the remarkable amount of restraint and rhythmic know-how these four employ. This band has come long way in that regard– it’s not easy to integrate the sounds of sex into song without coming off like the kind of guy with a favorite tree from which to creep.

Additionally, all of these songs undress very beautifully on their own terms as well. The ribbons of guitar that bind “Loop the Loop” together at its halfway point are stunning, praises that can also be sung for the acupunctural textures of closing beauty “End Come to Soon”. Wild Beasts have never been an especially easy outfit to connect to either forebears or contemporaries, but here they’ve found certain amount of kinship in the dusky, liberated grooves of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis. You can hear it in the somber tick-tocking of “Invisible”, just as much as the orbit of single “Albatross”. But that’s about as strong a link as you’re likely to find, a feat in its own right. This is gloriously layered music that opts to celebrate its quirks and cowlicks rather than suppress them. Organically. There’s a great amount of comfort that comes in hearing something like that. Thorpe delivers a unforgettable line in the circular prowl of “Plaything”, a new age sex jam if there ever was one. “New squeeze, take off your chemise, and I’ll do as I please,” he quivers. “I’m not any kind of heartthrob, but at the same time I’m not any kind of slob.” He makes a good point.

— David Bevan, May 13, 2011