Wild Beasts – Two Dancers



Remember the days of landfill indie? No, really, try and remember them because it’s important to remember the bad times so we can appreciate the good. Cumbria’s Wild Beasts may use guitars, drums and vocals and all be men, but they’re also evidence that using those instruments need not make you The Courteeners. For their second album, these four super intelligent young men decided to play about with time signatures, tamper with ideas of love and sex and throw out the rulebook that stated it wasn’t a good idea for white men to mess about with falsetto. Two Dancers is a complex, densely layered concoction that swirls about on a maelstrom of highly strung guitars and pounding drums, but somewhere in the middle gorgeous melodies start to appear as on the wonderfully catchy, ‘All The King’s Men’. As with Dirty Projectors or Grizzly Bear, the band are aware of how sounds play off each other, of how well harmonies can coalesce with sudden blasts of noise and then simmer down to something beautiful. Basically, it’s enough to warrant much excitement as to where they might go next.

Key track: ‘All The King’s Men’