Album Review: Wild Beasts – ‘Boy King’


Boy King




Back in 2008, Hayden Thorpe’s vocal gymnastics leaped effeminately all over Wild Beasts’ vaudevillian debut ‘Limbo, Panto’.

Eccentric music dovetailed with outlandish phrases such as “with wantingly wet lips I suck, remind me of your gentle f**k” and set them apart from other indie pluggers at the time. The Cumbrian crew of four felt hard to fully sum up, landing somewhere along the lines of odd figures in a world of even numbers.

By the time of the crowning ‘Present Tense‘ two years ago the theatrics were usurped by synths, crepuscular moods and far less shrilling, though sins of the flesh were kept as chief muse. And if the kooky distance from peers had contracted marginally, they maintained their boner of excellence as a stellar reason to hump the loins right off British guitar bands along with the likes of Alt-J and Royal Blood.

Now, five albums in with ‘Boy King‘, just cocking an ear to the breathy words “won’t get off until they taste it” on ‘Eat Your Heart Out Adonis‘ tells all: they are still as randy as a pre-internet teen alone with his mum’s Grattan catalogue.

The only difference being that Wild Beasts are quite happy for you to walk in on them. The door’s always ajar. Because they continually manage to eschew being caught sleazy-handed with their kecks down by proffering their fornicating fantasies as acts of sirenic art, to be awed at rather than set aghast by, japes about the ‘in-and- out’ or not.

The album fingers its way through the male condition with an olio of RnB grooves (‘Get My Bang‘), electro-funk fills (‘Ponytail‘) and, on the aggressive ‘Tough Guy‘, fretboard jerks and primal grunts. The stolid beat of ‘Big Cat‘ belies the rapacious, predatory need to be on top of the food chain. About as manlike a thought as possible, but on ‘Alpha Female‘ there is a capitulation to the XX chromosome, an admittance that however much brawn is on offer, man still yearns woman.

Wild Beasts have the luxury of two outstanding singers in Hayden and Tom Fleming. Well-heeled harmonies between them spin forward ‘He The Colossus‘ as Hayden at one point squeezes out “you could have me anytime, just flut those come-to-bed eyes” over staccato keyboards. Fleming’s sonorous lead on ‘BU‘ gifts one of the record’s most beautiful sounding moments, notwithstanding the Ed Gein-esque threats of wanting your face and skin.

The volte-face towards machoism is contra to the group’s early-day intuitions, and the spawn of abrasive yet chart-sheeny songs is no doubt propelled by producer John Congleton (of St Vincent credentials) operating on their distinct craft. It’s hard to take this turn as more than just a fad from a band perhaps wary of being stickered too much as a squidgy touch.

But this new hip bone gives them a contrasting step that is well worth following.



(Steven White)


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