Wild Beasts produced one of the best albums of last year in “Limbo, Panto”, and are renowned as one of the best live bands around. The first album was full of bombast and surreal, vaguely baroque songs sung in a phenomenally powerful falsetto. I say it’s a falsetto – in truth, I have no idea. I’ve just heard other people describe it as that. Either way, Hayden Thorpe is up there with Jonathan Meiburg in terms of current singers with technically fantastic voices.

All too often, technically great voices are undermined by dreadful lyrics. This is the case with almost all singers I see on TV – for a start, they’re probably not singing their own songs, and if they are, it’s usually something platitudinous and trite that they think Radio 2 listeners and Coldplay fans might buy. If they’re lucky, they might get to go on Jools Holland’s show. Well, I say bollocks to them – we’re all too busy to listen to bad lyrics.

Fortunately, the lyrics here are again largely obscure, seemingly at home celebrating both high and low culture. Based on the elaborate music, it would be reasonable to expect highbrow lyrics and an attempt to impress the listener with their education, but the lyrics here are just as accessible as those on albums by bands such as Arctic Monkeys, proud to wear their class on their sleeve. From Hooting And Howling’s grandiose “A crude art, a bovver boot ballet – equally elegant and ugly. I was as thrilled as I was appalled, courting him in a fisticuffing waltz” to All The King’s Men’s claim to like “Girls from Hounslow, girls from Whitby”, they seem not to be trying to impress the listener, which is rather refreshing. As someone who found the line “Take these chips with cheese as an offering of peace” from Please, Sir on the first album slightly grating, it is with relief that nothing here stands out as being unwieldly.

The gloom that pervades throughout the album is reminiscent of iLiKETRAiNS, and the use of Tom Fleming’s deeper voice on vocal duties in some songs, most successfully in the title song, is a clever move. Deliberately not playing their trump card in every song makes the listener appreciate it much more when it is played, and will surely help when the inevitable accusations of one-trick-ponydom start to fly.

Perhaps there aren’t as many glorious highs as there were on “Limbo, Panto”, but there isn’t a single identifiable weak song on the album. Hooting And Howling is the only song likely to soundtrack the dancefloors of indie nights, but is so gloriously romantic that I doubt many people will mind. The most obvious next single would be We Still Got The Taste Dancing On Our Tongues, which has more twists and turns than most bands fit into an album. “Why should we feel bad for what we’ve done? We’ve still got the taste dancing on our tongues, love the smash-and-grab of our goings-on”.

At once similar and wildly different to their debut, this is a real progression for Wild Beasts, and I would be surprised if it didn’t claim some very high places in end-of-year lists.

MP3s:
All The King’s Men
The Fun Powder Plot