Wild Beasts’ fourth (that’s right, fourth!) album opens with a burst of dramatic choir singing, with Hayden Thorpe’s voice breaking the exciting yet dreamlike synth background with his usual astonishing vocal range. Thorpe’s vocals are a key part of any Wild Beasts record, and he goes from strength to strength across the album, veering from thoughtful on lead single ‘Wanderlust’ to lascivious on ‘Nature Boy’ to gentle on ‘Mecca’ and mournful on ‘Dog’s Life’.
Synths shimmer and gleam in instrumental patches, illuminating the dreamscape of Wild Beasts’ active imagination. This glittering brilliance is most obvious on ‘Dog’s Life’, one of the highlights of the album. Beginning softly, it suddenly flickers into life about halfway through with a space-age riff to make Buzz Aldrin weep.
The album is their longest yet, which in itself is a statement about the band’s attempts at maturity. There was a time for ‘Brace Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants’, and it was a great time, but a 12-year-old band needs to be a bit less silly. In fact, the album’s few weak moments come when Wild Beasts take it all a bit too far. The synths in ‘Palace’ are a bit too 80s, and the song tends towards the over-the-top, camp dramatics that let them down on 2011’s Smother.
The range of emotions present in the lyrics is impressive as well. While meaning is deliberately and carefully made difficult to discern, ‘Nature Boy’ appears to be the story of a man whose wife is sleeping with someone else – “your lady wife around his lips”. ‘Daughters’ is a fine feminist anthem if a little condescending, with Thorpe telling us all about how “Jesus was a woman”. The indescribably tender ‘Mecca’ is the best song on the album, and is completely open to interpretation. It’s a toss-up as to whether it’s love (“we move in desire”), alcohol (“just a drop on the lips/and we’re more than equipped”) or something harder (“we didn’t reach a high/it was always inside”) being moved into a religious context as Thorpe croons that “we’ve a Mecca now”. Maybe it’s all three. Maybe it’s none.
It’s been five years since we’ve had a good album from this lot, but I’m pleased to say they’re back out of the wilderness.
