Wild At Heart

The Wild Beasts
Genre: Pop
From: Leeds via Kendal The Lake District, United Kingdom

In December last year the Devil announced that his favourite album of 2008 was the Wild Beast's 'Limbo Panto' so they have a lot to live up to with their new album 'Two Dancers' which is due for release in the US tomorrow. The good news is that the Cumbrian avant popsters don't disappoint with a more mature, more assured and more accessible album that leaves their debut, and all albums released this year, in it's wake like Usain Bolt on speed.

'Two Dancers' is infused with the purest essence of lonely garrets in the lake district, of misty moors, of wild and windy hills . If that makes it sound like some missive from the gothic underground it's not it's just magnificently poetic. It's also perhaps the most defiantly, erotically English album since the debuts of the Smiths and Suede with tracks like 'We Still Got The Taste Dancing On Our Tongues' turning a quick fumble up a back alley (oo er missus) into an event worthy of inclusion in the collected works of Byron.

Album opener ' The Fun Powder Plot', a semi-political critique of the English court's treatment of fathers in cases of child custody, is the Beasts' first foray into the nakedly political and echoes the Smiths' move from the inward looking self obsession of their debut to the political polemics of 'Meat Is Murder'. 'All The Kings Men', a misogynists take on the courtship ritual, is an unrivaled blend of The Associates on helium and freshly squeezed Orange Juice with Hayden Thorpe's soaring operatic falsetto perfectly counterbalanced by bassist Tom Fleming's Edwyn Collins like rich baritone.

The album is literally littered with words rarely seen in the history of rock 'n roll. Hooting, cahoots, bereft, pucker, dressing gowns, trousers, nuzzle and bobbing bait all appear, some on more than one track and I doubt that there is any band in the history of music that has ever been daring enough to rhyme dumpling with thumping as the Wild Beasts do on 'This Is Our Lot'.

Memo to every band in the world from tomorrow 'Two Dancers' will be the yardstick against which all albums will be judged.

Go Try

MP3 - The Wild Beasts - All The Kings Men
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Go Visit

The Wild Beasts - Myspace // Website // Last.FM

Go View

The Wild Beasts
Hooting & Howling