Overwhelming Instinct
Smother represents Wild Beast’s continued efforts to filter pop through the same spirit of mischievousness that some of our greatest guitar pop bands have mined in the past. BRAD BARRETT talks how-dare-they simplicity, musical unlearning and trying to
play your own records. Photography: Paul Phung
Beasts are the ones responsible for prising apart those goalposts; not just for us but for themselves. The Kendal band’s third album, Smother, demonstrates that the unfettered bursts of incredible oddness found on Wild Beasts’ debut Limbo, Panto – a divisive, truly original screaming cabaret – has been filtered down into a more spatially aware music that glowers beneath the lush textures. The chiming meshwork of guitars are all but gone, replaced by a vortex of timbres and sounds, the voices lilting gently around the edge of the whirlpool. This dramatic warping began with 2009’s excellent Two Dancers, where a sustained train of restrained melody flooded the senses with simplicity disguised as complexity at its core. “It’s almost braver and more difficult to do less and choosing what you do rather than filling everything,” suggests singer and live bassist, Hayden Thorpe.
R 50 3pickup
edefining your personal parameters of what constitutes pop happens less than you’d like it to but more than you realise. I don’t know at which point falsetto and baritone colliding in a billowing cloud of vaudeville and spectral moods became pop in my mind, but Wild
“On the last album, my hands were always doing something or I was singing all the time. This time minutes go by where I’m not doing anything. It’s really liberating just to be able to stand back and enjoy it. We’re trying to be more effective with less and do bigger things with less. If you can do something with six chords, why can’t you do it with three?” Why indeed. It’s not in the lack of notes that Wild Beasts seem to stand out, but rather the depth that they seem to draw from so few of them. It could be down to their approach to instrumentation, which is anything but orthodox; it could be the expression wrung from Hayden and Tom Fleming’s vocal chords; or it could be the haunting sparseness that seems soaked in pathos. “There’s almost a how-dare-we simplicity. Albatross or Deeper; they’re so brutally simple. That’s just kind of listening to music and trying to understand how to make it good,” says co-vocalist and guitarist Tom. Rather than feverishly picking apart their favourite records in the vain pursuit of emulating those sounds, the band instead resorted to creating new sounds of their own. With laptop and sampler in hand they lugged their equipment outside, capturing field recordings and found sounds, resulting in some puzzling but
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