Wild Beasts
Two Dancers
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Label: Domino
When they first popped up last year with Limbo Panto, Wild Beasts seemed like just another NME flavor of the week, albeit one with a killer single in "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants-" an epically strange little number that comes the closest to Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets of any contemporary band. Little more than a year later, the group has resurfaced with Two Dancers; its quick gestation perhaps a sign that the band hoped to prove they were more than a flash in the pan. Somehow, Two Dancers goes beyond proving that the band is serious, even accomplishing what often seems impossible- a sophomore effort that far outshines the idiosyncratic debut.
Where Limbo, Panto was an interesting but flawed work, Two Dancers feels fully formed, both an update of the debut and a thoroughly vital album capable of making one forget that prior release even exists. On debuts, bands are expected to be young and raw, cohesion ignored in favor of the creation and execution of a different sound. Limbo, Panto accomplished this and if the band had taken the time to release a follow-up that was even just a regurgitation of that sound a la The Strokes' Room on Fire, they would have been sitting pretty. Instead, Two Dancers is clearly an album by a band inspired, with elements of their regular sound tweaked and other parts of it ditched in favor of grander things.
The biggest change is that Wild Beasts have gained the confidence to let their songs breathe, shedding the sometimes chaotic clutter that marked their debut in favor of wide open spaces. The album begins with the tranquil organ of "The Fun Powder Plot," which lingers on one huge chord before a synth bass takes the lead, navigating the waters of the track while the guitars leap between e-bow screams and lazily plucked notes. The percussion is as eccentric as ever, low-end sacrificed in favor of woodblocks and shakers. Similarly, Hayden Thorpe's vocals are as bizarre as always, though he's gained more control of his range, his nasally pitch not as grating as before, closer to Antony than Eno now. Though "The Fun Powder Plot" is as minimalist as it gets in terms of chord progressions, the band's now-expert structuring and Thorpe's ability to carve out numerous melodies from one small source make the track seem as expansive as any orchestral piece with half the pretension.
"Hooting and Howling" is similarly simple in structure but takes a more traditionally poppy approach, Thorpe sounding like the Top 40 version of Klaus Nomi as the band sways and tangos to the jaunty bassline and B-52's-by-way-of-Joy Division guitar line. "All the King's Men" heads somewhere else entirely, the bass mirrored by a group vocal line that's like a football crowd's take on the Futureheads, Tom Flemming's lead vocal take dazzling in its maneuvering between opposite ends of a range. Flemming's default tone is a rich lower contrast to Thorpe's falsetto and the interplay between the two is one of the band's best weapons.
The album's stand-out by far is "We Still Got the Taste Dancing On Our Tongues," which does Kate Bush one better, a glimpse of what that mysterious songwriter would sound like with an ace backing band and a nod towards the hips rather than the darker recesses of the mind. Again the word of the day is simplicity, the band letting the song accelerate through the momentum of the rhythm section and keeping the guitars to little siren calls here and there that come to a head on the chorus. Thorpe has a knack for anchoring his melodies to each instrument in turn, the bass for the chorus, the lead guitar line on the bridge and even the drums at some points. This technique serves to both augment his voice and spotlight the strengths of the group; since the band has been around since 2002, it's not difficult to imagine much of the success of that technique comes from being around long enough as a group to know each other's talents in and out.
Two Dancers is a clear step forward for Wild Beasts, ably taking them from talented rookies to driven, inspired standouts in one leap. The few tracks that hold Two Dancers back are even inspiring in their own right, indicating that Wild Beasts are a band unhappy with sticking to any one template for too long, instead pursuing ideas as far as they can go and then moving on. Their debut may have marked them as a potential novelty, but Two Dancers has proven that Wild Beasts are on the path to genuine discovery.
by Morgan Davis
