The lineup: Hayden Thorpe (guitar, lead vocals), Tom Fleming (bass, backing vocals), Ben Little (lead guitar), Chris Talbot (drums).
The background: And now for something quite extraordinary. Wild Beasts, who come from Kendal near the Lake District, live in Leeds but sound like Antony Hegarty fronting a group of musicians from Mars or Noel Coward warbling aphorisms as Vampire Weekend jam in the distance. They are not your average thrash-bang-wallop indie band. They pirouette around the sort of reference points that could have resulted in a camp travesty, some sort of mish-mash of music hall and modern rock, but they manage to focus their wilder, beastlier tendencies towards the creation of accessibly alien pop. With Sparks embarking tomorrow night on the first of their 21-album showcases at the Islington Academy in London, Wild Beasts are hardly the only exponents of idiosyncratic, otherwordly pop in town, but it still gladdens the heart that a young four-piece are making the effort to Not Sound Like The Clash.
Mind you, in the YouTube video for their Mika-ishly unmanly single, Assembly, we were dismayed to see the singer wearing a tight-fitting T-shirt and the rest of the band in jeans. Too pedestrian and insufficiently polymorphously perverse, we thought. We were expecting sci-fi burkhas, or Day-Glo robes at the very least. Furthermore, we're concerned that we can still break down the sound and make out what instruments are being played at any given moment - they need an alchemist, not a producer, to transform their base matter, their bass, guitars and drums, into ethereal, liquid pop.
Nevertheless, from what we've heard, Limbo, Panto, the group's debut album, is as far-out and fabulous a collection as we've heard from a British act this year. Recorded in Malmo, Sweden with Tore Johannson at the controls, it features titles such as Vigil For A Fuddy Duddy, The Club Of Fathomless Love, Woebegone Wanderers, She Purred While I Grrred, Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants and Cheerio Chaps, Cheerio Goodbye. It also has striking falsetto vocals that fall just the right side of comical, music that plays around with form and stretches the shape of the three-minute pop song as far as it will go without snapping into ugly atonality, and lyrics that include, very possibly for the first time, words like 'conundrum' and references to formerly fashionable hair emollients. "We made a conscious effort to be as individual as we could. It came out of a boredom and lack of interest in beer and testosterone rock," these Wild Beasts don't so much roar as whimper theatrically. "It concentrated us like a fruit."
The buzz: "Delightful, romantic, magical and timeless."
The truth: The best New Band Of The Day since White Rabbits or Fleet Foxes.
Most likely to: Set the teeth of Pigeon Detectives fans on edge.
Least likely to: Be invited to Ron and Russell Mael's house for tea.
What to buy: Limbo, Panto is released by Domino on June 16, followed by single The Devil's Crayon.
File next to: Antony & The Johnsons, Associates, Sparks, DeafSchool.
Links: http://www.myspace.com/wildbeasts
Tomorrow's new band: The Japanese Popstars.
See Also
