I first reviewed a WILD BEASTS' single back in November 2006 and wrote "An astonishing début". I had seen them for the first time in July of that year and I was convinced from the first song. Here was a pop group that captured exhilaration, outsiderness, daring musical adventure and otherworldly voices. The secret bonus was a red and white Burns (Shadows Custom Signature?) guitar in the hands of someone who could play. Here too was a band that played the dance music I would have danced to if I had ever had the confidence. They also had the adventurous art college spirit of the early 80s, with added jazz and poetic, intelligent, mysterious lyrics.
But that was a year and a half ago. They soon moved from Ed Mason's remarkable Bad Sneakers label to the bigger (now pop-enhanced) Domino and an album was toiled on for months and months.
LIMBO, PANTO finally reached me when it was already up to release date and I hardly dared listen. Reviews had been stacking up from every quarter - all delirious. Could it really be as good as I had hoped? The great names were voting for it and a slightly worrying swarm-thing was undermining my confidence.
No. After 20 plays and a total inability to write anything I have finally found some words to declare all doubts blasted to hell.
It's a personal thing. It's such precious music. It reminds me, so long after those years in my own life, of the wide eyed excitement of being young, being different, and knowing that there were people out there in the darkest places who wouldn't hold back from emotional honesty, or shirk from total commitment to their muse and who could actually make new sounds, with a new vocabulary and a new aesthetic. Their gaudy fauvism of rural imaginings can spin and celebrate and trounce the shyness that leads us into shabby conformity. As these songs crackle across the Internet, ruffling the lasers in a million CD players and thudding against the walls of a thousand indie night venues, a lot of people are going to feel validated, affirmed and thoroughly alive. Stuff the sales figures. Stuff the reviews. This stuff is alive.
The fact that some people will just not hear it is like extra vindication. The album becomes a test of identity and a mark of fellowship.
"Vigil For A Fuddy Duddy" starts with great thumping resonant drum beats. Hayden Thorpe's pure falsetto, beautifully recorded, soars. After pestering through the year with live recordings, myspace tracks and demos, this huge album noise immediately announces a promise of quality of sound and rich detail, from no more than guitars, drums, piano and voices. The fulfilment of that ambition is fully realised throughout the album. Lyrically, "flushed with hot hormones", this opening song also makes clear a major theme that the album pursues for its honest strength, always directly and never as a sniggering signifier of big, clever or cool. Hayden sings: "Men to be men must love and pity / so deeply and secretly". Lads for lads.
"The Club Of Fathomless" Love six eight is a dizzying declaration of strength against the hegemony of locker room homophobia: "I'm not a soft touch, and won't be seen as such ... I'm not soppy and stuff ... I hold my brothers in breathtaking clinches". The opening verse is sheer poetic bravado "I've roiled, rucked over and rabble roused have I not? / With a heart as big as a dustbin lid have I not?" Wonderful stuff.
"The Devil's Crayon" lightens the fighting mood that was about to burst. It's bubbling lilt sends out a surge of excited emotion form bar one. Delicate, balanced, dancing glee form Chris Talbot's lithe drums and Tom Fleming's melodic bass. Fleming also takes over as principal vocalist - a nice shift that keeps the band surprising and fresh. The Devil's crayon traces shoulder blades and you glow like rayon. The impressionistic tenor of such bold strokes of lyric colour fires the emotional and visual imagination in glorious ways. It's a long time since potentially popular music carried such intense poetry. "This truly is the Devil's shoulder" nudges our thoughts and dreams in spiritual and physical directions with unsettling simultaneity. "We are so much mouldy dough" - malleable, needy, rotting from the start with hallucinogenic fungi. This really is the adult end of pantomime, mummery and danse macabre - limbo as the netherworld (with the ground hugging dance not left out).
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"Woebegone Wanderers" is back in the locker room with yellow toothed manager and a failing team of northern lads. Football and mud get romanced and swung around with the change of end and the orange halves: "just win the big match, it's all I can ask" dribbles our coach. But, out comes the defiance: "I'd swear by my own cock and balls" is as fine a line as you're going to get this year, deftly, subversively placed. Cowardice and a slap on the arse from my baby are all tipped in. And it waltzes off into the fade from an otherwise four square rhythm. A tempo that could be commenting on the creative tension in the football attitudes.
In "The Old Dog", piano and hand claps make yet another fresh beginning and another of those beautifully developed guitar tunes sets off. And what a sucker punch of a first line "Casual sex with a hard up thug" (and not a flicker on the "hard up") "Darling I regret, there's life in the old dog yet!" has a swish of the Noël Coward.
"Please Sir" touches gently but surely on the sexual undercurrents of teacher/pupil intensity, in poetry as subtle and equivocal as Sting's "Don't Stand So Close" is prosaic and obvious. As with each of these allusive, elusive songs, the story is graphic, visceral, and "explicit", but fragmentary. A listener can hear what a listener is ready for.
"His Grinning Skull" is a paean to exhumation and the physicality of death's ravage across both the quick and the dead. "Perched on his skull, he now wears cuckold's horns" sings, in terse accuracy, of the sins of the living. The closing refrain of "heave ho, heave ho ..." echoes an imagined devils' crew as they drag the young sinful whelp down to a place below. It's chilling, bold, ridiculous and thoroughly entertaining with an absolutely wonderful tune. The drummer, punning wickedly, taps a wooden block with a deliberately dead hand on the fourth of each six beats in three out each four bars. The exquisite joys of this album are many.
"She Purred While I Grrred" is “fleshy and sweet” with a chunky guitar phrase and booming bass. A magnificent heterosexual encounter "huffing and puffing on the mattress stuffing" is an adroitly ambiguous switch of approach, just another way in which the album refuses to pander to assumptions, expectations or any smart-arsed desire to know everything (even anything) too soon.
"Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants" was the single (re-recorded here I think) we have already loved - that "astonishing" first release. But "Cheerio Chaps, Cheerio Goodbye" closes the album with a waltz that sways out in magnificent style. Apart from the bright, searing guitar parts, it has a tune and a half and growls, whoops and gurgles its way through lines like "So I gloat, with gritted grin / To cheat my chin into keeping the womanly wibbling in", a mention of "happy slap" that works, and a football stadium full of chorus for 60,000 Cumbrian men.
Towering over the delights of this album is the fresh-air clarity of Tore Johansson's production. Even rattling along on a train with the mealiest of mp3 players and lowest of low-end earphones I can hear all the lyrics, all the drum sounds, each of the harmony lines and every twinkle of every guitar (take a deep bow Ben Little). The subject matter might in parts be furtive, moist and dark, but the sound has something of the Fells about it, like sun breaking through after rain, when the air itself glistens with pride at the wonderful view.
Cheerio Chaps!
www.wild-beasts.co.uk
www.limbo-panto.com
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