Gary Lightbody's Band of The Week: Wild Beasts

Well, it's about that time to talk of things that made the year special and although I won't resort to a list, I will spend the next few of these concentrating on an album of the year each week.

First up is a record so mysterious, sinfully beautiful and just pure sinful it feels like it's from another time altogether. Not ancient but parallel. Another time-line from the one we skate on altogether. Wild Beasts' filthy opus Two Dancers is an undisputed handsome, if wanton, charmer that I would not trust within a mile of my sister or female cousins, should it wish to become their suitor.

Antiquated arranged marriage metaphors aside, it is a very special thing indeed. So defiantly strange while never losing its silken pop infectiousness throughout. It is a funny, smart, filthy and playful record that I found myself unable, or unwilling, to break out from under the spell of.

Hayden Thorpe's falsetto may divide opinion and, to be honest, it took me a few listens to get used to, but now I am deeply in love with it. His turn of phrase, too, is as strange as his voice: "what's so wrong with just a little fun?/We still got the taste dancing on our tongues/When we pucker up our lips are bee stung/We still got the taste dancing on our tongues" (We Still Got The Taste...) to be concluded with the bold and brilliant full stop of the line "Why should we feel bad for what we have done?" A song full of debauched majesty and the eschewing of post-bender early morning ignominy.

Anyway, Thorpe's falsetto is tempered by the gravel-edged baritone of Tom Fleming, put to devastating use on part one of the dual title track: "Do you want my bones between your teeth/They pull me half alive out of the sea...I feel as if I've been where you have been" he growls and you believe him. These two very different vocal styles are symptomatic of the recurring themes and general attitude of the record: things that are often at loggerheads are in fact simpatico.

Perhaps the most unusual paradox is that this album of ceaseless sexual adventure and libertinism is born out of the minds of four guys from the Lake District and not LA, New Orleans or Outer Space. The fact that it sounds like nothing else from the UK right now is a given, as it sounds like nothing else from anywhere, really, but it is funny to think that the land of Wordsworth is too the land of Wild Beasts. A new Romantic poetry of sorts. Well, perhaps without the romance. This is glib, though, and unfair as the music itself is often heart-smashingly romantic. The words sometimes, though ("This is a booty call/My boot, your arsehole") are forthright to say the least.

I am still lost in this record and every day it shocks me with either its splendour or when a new line I hadn't caught before lashes up at me like a whip. It will no doubt make most end of year lists. It's at the top of mine.

Love in the time of swine flu. g.x

2:54 PM | 18/12/2009

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