WILD BEAST's triumphantly good second album has been playing in our house for a whole week now. My last.fm page claims 192 bestial scrobbles, which means I have played the new album 17 times over with a few old demos from 2006 mixed in for research purposes. I still haven't stopped playing it.
The point is that like all the very best pop albums, TWO DANCERS is a compulsive bundle of real songs. Like a perfect drug, it releases the pleasure in measured doses. It starts gently with an expectant tingle of rising sustain, and dances on through 37 minutes of womb-like swaying pulses, with soothing, yearning, exultant vocals and wildly extravagant lyrics. It's fierce intelligence applied to the rudimentary delights of youth and libidinous optimism.
There are eight full songs and two linking pieces. The full songs share vintage qualities, bursting with love and the desire to be loved. The linking pieces "When I'm Sleepy" and "Underbelly" take me back to more innocent times when interesting ideas could decorate albums with diverting noises. There is the suddenly groaning guitar of "When I'm Sleepy ...". and there is the near-absence of band in the dream-like section of "Underbelly" where Hayden Thorpe's famous voice rings out in an isolated and startled tremor.
"The Fun Powder Plot" leads with bass and chimes with an insistent, clear guitar riff that eventually becomes a harshly repeated chord. It closes with a faintly Japanese melody. Typically subversive, male-challenging lyrics play about with the "cause" espoused by Fathers 4 Justice and their purple flour bomb escapades in the House of Commons in 2004. The disarming gentleness and the ambiguous identification are typical Wild Beast motifs. The song ridicules and kicks arses, but it fondles and it dances too.
The dark side is very present in "Hooting And Howling". The having-a-laugh of Clockwork Orange and lads out on a Saturday night in Leeds or Kendal is teased into a beautiful eight note guitar line and Hayden Thorpe singing at his falsetto sweetest, about washing off the blood. It's "I Predict A Riot" from the point of view of male eroticism thrilled by uncontrolled danger, expressed in a whisper.
"All The King's Men" sticks with the themes. Tom Fleming joins the fray, coming in over Hayden's near-squeal of foetal introduction, with warm tenored appeals to the girls of Roedean, Shipley, Hounslow and Whitby. The direct link is with sex's purpose - the mothering as life's reply to the broken bodies we will all become.
By "We Still Got The Taste Dancin' On Our Tongues" the band's melodious bass and tuned drums are well set into a grove, bubbling well away from pop's usual splash and hiss of too much cymbal and snare. The title's repeated phrase snaps us to attention. What's this one all about then? The taste of what? "Trousers and blouses make excellent sheets down dimly lit streets". It's all as innocent or as debauched as your imagination and experience could attempt. There's some very creative guitar in the final lap. The build towards it is so subtle you could easily miss it.
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I chuckled with recognition at the intro to "Two Dancers (I)". A digital delay on Benny Little's opening guitar solo is dead ringer (and ring it does) for something iLiKETRAiNS have done. But it lasts just a moment, setting us into a shiver that becomes something much more WILD BEASTS - with its anonymously visceral impropriety and its invitation to feel the pulse and smell the blood.
Two Dancers (II) seems to float above the scene of (I)'s crime, toying with the idea that a song can have a sequel with a different tune and a different arrangement. The mysteries embedded in what WILD BEASTS are up to are buried in here somewhere.
"This Is Our Lot" brings us back to the swaggering bravado of the opening trio of songs. As a band the fluency of their playing is an absolute joy. It doesn't crackle or race away but it does make the extraordinary sound easy and natural. Producer Richard Formby seems to have made only the gentlest of interventions. There is more synth, a little more decoration and perhaps a more even texture than on Limbo, Panto. But the feel is that the band are playing, or could easily play all this as live. It's a subtle thing. But it fits with the physicality of the band's approach to their music. And perhaps the shorter time frame, with everything written and recorded in a much shorter period has give the album a unity and sense of purpose that help to make it such a pleasure.
With Fathers 4 Justice opening, "Empty Nest" is the wistful closer, a mother's lament for her missing lads, off to Leeds and London to make a living and break some hearts in the same old rituals of fighting, fucking, forgetting - and staying loved and human. It closes the album in that hopelessly romantic six eight tempo that ended LIMBO PANTO.
Where LIMBO PANTO, as near a masterpiece as any first album can be, bore the flushed pride of several year's gestation and anxious self-doubt TWO DANCERS is a mature realisation of WILD BEAST's clearly stated ambition - to make accessibly wonderful pop songs with the broad appeal and excited tumescence of pop's adolescence when singles mattered and young men could strut like peacocks. I can think of very few bands who can claim to have released two such albums with their first two efforts. With luck, the indie chart appeal of the sound on this one will have the side effect of a lot of people discovering the more exotic thrills of LIMBO, PANTO.
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