Wild Beasts – Two Dancers (Domino)
5/5
When listening to Two Dancers, the second LP from Domino darlings Wild Beasts, you’d be forgiven, at certain points, for thinking that the group had taken some of the biggest pop hits of recent years as the point of germination for the new record. The swooping organ that opens the album, for instance, sounds exactly like the beginning of ‘Bleeding Love’, and more than one person will be tricked into thinking they’re hearing a cover of ‘I Kissed a Girl’ when a thumping Glitter-beat signals the arrival of ‘All the King’s Men’.
It is true that the band have always seemed to be making what is essentially pop music - just in their own mould. No strangers to a hook, debut album Limbo, Panto specialised in them slathering their distinctive character traits over things like the organic four-to-the-floor of single ‘Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants’ – a ninth chord here, a three-part harmony there, and always the utterly astonishing vocals of singer Hayden Thorpe. However, on Two Dancers, the band proceed to push their formula far, far beyond the boundaries covered in their previous work, wrenching and twisting the Wild Beasts sound into something startling, bristling, brilliant and alive.
Musically, each member seems to have found a place they’re far more comfortable in than they were on album one. The drumming of Chris Talbot takes a far more prominent role than on Limbo…, pushing and bustling the record towards its climax, and Tom Fleming’s basslines (ranging from ghostly flit on opener ‘The Fun Powder Plot’ to the webby darkness of ‘We Still Got the Taste Dancin’ on our Tongues’) murmur like a sinister angel under the melodies. Guitars glisten and ring like quicksilver, in turn chiming harsh on ‘Hooting and Howling’ and slipping into a broken music-box swing for ‘Two Dancers (II)’ and ‘Underbelly’. Hayden Thorpe can still, at the drop of the hat, switch from deranged child to a sweet intensity akin to Anthony Hegarty, and he appears to have learned how to both assimilate himself into the sound and still sound like no indie singer out there.
But what of the songs? They are, to put it quite simply, astonishing. I don’t quite know how, but the group have managed to make Limbo…, a fine debut in anyone’s eyes, sound positively ordinary when put up against their new work. Driven by a seemingly insatiable desire to lay bare the myriad emotions tied up in love, sex, and the futility of youth, this set of ten tracks sets about blowing all previous notions clean out the water whilst somehow still being inexorably Wild-Beastly.
Take, for instance, the wink-wink romp of first album track ‘She Purred, While I Grrred’; a pleasing and titillating piece of Carry On… style fun, to be sure, and perfectly listenable – but then play that up against the delicious noir of ‘We Still Got…’ – “when we pucker up our lips are bee-stung/we still got the taste dancin’ on our tongues … trousers and blouses make excellent sheets around dimly lit streets” – or the final dead-eyed sexual release concluding ‘This is our Lot’ (“my darling, my dumpling, my plump heart a’thumping … I couldn’t be more ready/a glottal stop/bottled up/waiting for the penny drop”). It’s no contest – this new material totally transcends their previous work in a way that makes the old sound appear the clang and thump of some second-rate tribute band. All over the place there are the most eloquent odes to getting f**ked and f**king up since Keats penned ‘Bring me Women, Wine and Snuff’: ‘Hooting and Howling’ sums up with “we’re just bruised looking for shops to loot/we’re just bruised looking to have a hoot”; ‘We Still Got…’ proclaims with outlandish vigour “we got gusto, we are headstrong … love the smash and grab of our goings on”; and ‘Empty Nest’, the last hurrah, calls for a lost one who “had it all” to return, with the record closing up “I welcome your call. These walls don’t fall.”
Which, with all the triumphs-of-heart-and-hope sentiment of that final line, leads us very nicely on to love. And, more specifically, the two title tracks that form the core of Two Dancers. The first sees our dancer/lover wandering on, through “snow [that] had piled up knee-high in the streets”, calling over a bed of jagged harmony that occasionally lets a wail or a scream slip through. He captures this hopeless, joyless thing called love that only seems to make him ill, “pulled … half-alive out of the sea”. On he trudges, looking for this scent of emotion anywhere – “I feel as if I have been where you have been”. He implores of his absent other “O, do you want my bones between your teeth?” …
And sure enough, they answer – “O, do you want my heart between your teeth?”. Over ringing chimes, the second title track is the skeleton of their sound laid bare, the music slopping over the weird chords and disappearing into the groups’ heart – darkened, battered, but still most definitely beating.
Artists in this article: Wild Beasts
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment