moments, really.”
“That was one of the things we really wanted to go for; that sense of grappling in the dark,” says Tom. “I think we’re terrified of being experts. Like ‘We know what we’re doing, listen to our great art’.” He laughs at the righteous pomposity of it. But grappling in the dark is remarkably astute from an outsider’s point of view. Not only does it suggest the eroticism of the lyrics, the exploratory sense of swimming through some murky depths that the music somehow provides but also that you – the listener – is blindly searching for answers that aren’t there. It’s best not to look too closely, but allow whatever is going to touch you to have its way with you. It’s close to the approach Wild Beasts took to piecing this record together.
“The magic of learning is it deflects things back at us in different angles. There’s so many sounds where we just thought ‘that sounds cool’ and recorded it.”
“There’s a big apprehension that the professional musician should know exactly what they’re doing and be fully within their realms of capability and for us that’s just the most uninspiring thing really,” admits Hayden. “We’re still learning to use equipment which we could only use really crudely but the magic of that is it deflects things back at us in different angles. There’s so many sounds and things that we just turned them on and thought ‘that sounds cool’ and recorded it.” Surprisingly for a record that was written fairly quickly, it demands repeat listens and at a fairly brief 42 minutes, there’s still plenty to absorb. “It was a combination of longer running ideas and fragments of ideas that
progressed over 18 months and that was combined with very spontaneous almost improvised ideas so it was a real mixture, a real blend of impulsion and real sort of considered production really,” explains Hayden. It’s a previously discussed sense of urgency that keeps Wild Beasts evolving and churning their potent ingredients into an increasingly hearty stew. Hayden seems at pains to reinforce this, dismissing any idea of needing to do an about turn to keep things fresh. “I don’t think it’s about recapturing anything. We thrive off the right to
reinvention and as soon as it feels like we’re stepping on our own toes again, we flinch and move in a different direction. We need to keep remembering – we keep saying this – our 16 year old selves – when you listen to music with untainted ears, what means the most and what feels the best. This sense of having to unlearn things...” This sense of trying to recapture just a snippet of the feeling that engulfed them as a younger band is more about deftly sidestepping the usual trappings of relative success than relying on the past. This is something even the best bands fail to realise at times, and it’s to Wild Beast’s credit that though Smother is less of a leap than Two Dancers was, it’s still a significantly eloquent statement. “One of the strong points of this record from our point of view is that all these songs wouldn’t exist the way they do without the songs before and there’s an inherent knowledge of what to do with them and a learnt subtlety,” says Hayden.
But for all this talk of simplicity, the songs have expanded to necessitate
rewarding results, nonetheless. “That’s one of the things we really liked when we first showed some of the demos to Laurence at Domino. ‘I don’t know what that sound is, I don’t know who’s making it and I don’t know why it’s being made’ and we were like ‘cool, we’ll go with that’,” says Hayden. Take the track Burning, for example, which is almost entirely based around a homemade looped sample of a spoon dropped onto a piano string from one of producer Richard Formby’s keyboards. It’s effect is a fluid clattering which could be thousands of glass decanters shattering consecutively. More subtly, the snare sound at the beginning of Plaything is a field recording of quarry activity in Yorkshire. These exotic found sounds, scrappy techniques – guitars recorded into laptop mics – and sonic expertise from Richard have resulted in an astonishing response to the original adage: “There was one mission statement before the record was made: to make something beautiful.” As Hayden is keen to point out, “the big realisation was; to make something beautiful didn’t mean to make something perfect or something that was correct. It meant allowing all those accidents and allowing those vulnerable
pickup451
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