Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
Wild Beasts are very much a band on the up and fast becoming new indie darlings of the music media. Unlike the debut albums of labelmates Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys (the Kendall four-piece are on Domino) it didn’t sell as well but it matched those albums in terms of critical acclaim. Expectation then is pretty rife then for this new album and it leaves people like me, who haven’t heard their first album (2008′s Limbo, Panto), wondering what all the fuss is about.
Hooting & Howling boasts Hayden Thorpe’s almost angelic sounding crooning against a wonderfully arranged piece of music that starts off with a simple bass pulse and ends as a hypnotic highlight. The album’s highlight though is the title track, split into two parts, which is atmospheric, sinister and allows Thorpe to show off a lower singing register, making him sound like a different singer altogether. The tribal drums kicks off the final track, The Empty Nest, and by this point you are pretty much hooked in, there is no escape from their trance and all cynicism about the media hype is forgotten.
Whether or not this is a brilliant follow up to Limbo, Panto is not for me to say (well, not yet anyway) but what I can say is that this is a fantastic album that doesn’t sound like anything else right now in the fickle world of ‘indie’ music. Two Dancers is an album made by people who know how to craft a song and make it sound like their own thing. It’s a foregone conclusion that this will appear in critics’ end of year lists and it is justified. Forgive me for sounding like every music publication/website but the sooner you buy Two Dancers the better.
RATING – 4/5
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Posted on August 11th, 2009 by Max
Filed under: Albums, Reviews
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