Wild Beasts - Beautiful Brutes

While originality in pop music is a rare and precious thing, the shock of the new has a tendency to repulse as many as it attracts. Back in 2008, Wild Beasts managed to blindside a UK scene grown comfortable with the likes of Kaiser Chiefs and Muse, and stretch the four-blokes-with-guitars-drums-‘n-bass formula to an outer limit of theatrical faux-camp outrageousness. Their first record, Limbo Panto, split critics and audiences alike, thanks in no small part to Hayden Thorpe’s inimitable vocals, his soaring countertenor liable to swing from wanton caterwaul to velvet croon while never being anything less than hypnotic.

Chatting from his East London flat ahead of the release of the group’s third album, Smother, Thorpe looks back on their initial splash with pride, attributing its more bizarre aspects to youthful naivety and a long, cloistered gestation in their isolated, North England town of Kendal. “There’s a sort of purity to it, in that it was completely unknowingly Dada and avant-garde. We thought we were making pop music,” he muses. “For a long time we were more embarrassed by [the weirder elements], but then we began to realise that those were the things that set us apart.”

Peopled by blokes who are into their booze and footy, Limbo careered between the abject and the divine, its hapless characters slaves to raging libidos and desires that exceed the bounds of what society may deem acceptable or even want to know about – take ‘The Old Dog’ as case in point, a simmeringly lush ballad about casual sex amongst the over-65s. For their follow-up Two Dancers (2009, made “in the aftermath of our dreams with the first record collapsing”), the group reigned in Thorpe’s wilder vocal excesses, giving greater weight to the gruff, moderating baritone of bass player Tom Fleming, while incorporating more electronic textures to produce a sleeker, more sophisticated sound.

This direction has found its logical extension on Smother, the aching carnality of ‘Plaything’ or glowing surface of ‘Albatross’ being reached through a need to “create something of beauty”, as the band challenged themselves with unfamiliar equipment and software to achieve the shimmering textures of the finished songs. “When I pick up a guitar, I know what it’s going to do,” says Thorpe. “I think there’s something rather boring about that. [But] use a sampler or software, and there’s an element of not knowing that I think is crucial for creating the atmosphere that we want to create … You have to be excited about what you’re doing, and one of the ways of doing that is to sort of go into the dark and see what you pull out.

“One of our big realisations was that beauty demands imperfection and demands a crudeness and a brutality sometimes, twinned with a lushness, y’know? It’s like the Photoshop syndrome, where the face has a few blemishes on it, a few pockmarks, but [when] you clear that face up, it’s no longer human … it’s just this generic face. There was a real sense of wanting to maintain those things that make it seem more vulnerable, show ourselves a bit more.”

Although the group was boosted by being signed to Domino early in their career, Thorpe is dubious about success within “the dirty machinery and filthy cogs that work behind the beautiful facade that is the music industry”. “I think we cannot be needy about what we do – it’s not a snatch and grab scenario,” he says. “We’re not the product of hype or sensationalism. Maybe that’s why it’s a slowly growing success; we’re aiming to make a long-range point, rather than make our point and disappear.”

As to what that point might be, try passing the steely-eyed social realism of, say, Mike Leigh, through an aesthetic sensibility more in keeping with Oscar Wilde or Rimbaud.  There are few groups brave enough to have delved as deeply into the (sometimes intensely ugly) rents and fissures of male sexuality with such single-minded focus, nor with such exquisite musicality. Take Fleming’s ‘All The King’s Men’ from Two Dancers for example, where any comforting old-world charm is undercut by savagely ironic lines like “you’re birthing machines / and let me show my darling what that means”.

“I think that the way society is set up, we can’t really fully explore real desire,” says Thorpe. “Society is set up to regulate and compartmentalise instinct. That probably sounds really highbrow, but it’s not meant to. I just think that songs can reveal things that can’t be revealed in the everyday. I think that there’s a real thrill in revealing those things, those forces; exploring the line between what’s safe and what’s unsafe, what’s right to sing and what’s wrong to sing.” Although less overtly salacious than its predecessor, a sense of risk unavoidably percolates beneath the glisteningly seamless surface of Smother, the lyrics veering between uncomfortably intimate and outright lascivious. “These songs are love songs,” says Thorpe, “but that love is not the pumping, glamorous all-or-nothing thing that a lot of love songs try and make it seem. We try to be human about it: you can love and hate someone at the same time. It’s about the push and pull of power.

“It’s a complex thing to be a man. There’s that unresolved element of what is expected of a man, that blend of being a gentleman as well as being a brute, caring as well as protective – I think there’s a strange dynamic going on there.”

First published in The Brag, Iss. 411, May 9th 2011