Send "Wild Beasts " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Noripcord |
 There have been some mighty curious double bills over the years (Blondie choosing Spearmint to accompany them as they relaunched around the turn of the century was especially surreal, and M83's forthcoming dates alongside the Kings Of Leon should prove fairly fascinating too), but three were few spectacles last year to compare with the sight of Wild Beasts opening for Jack Penate, of all people. Don't get us wrong, Penate's not without his copious charms, but, to his obvious chagrin – see his Run For Your Life for details – there's a significant element of his constituency that are most comfortable faced with lager, laddism and what we're now calling landfill indie, and, consequently, seldom has the red mist been seen to descend at a gig so swiftly as it did at the Astoria...Heaven knows, then, what that section of the indie audience will make of Limbo, Panto, since, rather than chastening the Beasts at all, their experiences appear to have strengthened their resolve and led them down some fabulously uncompromising paths. You may by now have heard them being spoken of in similar sentences to Queen and Sparks, and both are entirely valid, since there's a profound air of playfulness and theatre suffusing this entire album, but where the Kendal combo really excel is in taking what should be a stock lineup and crafting something shockingly other from it. Recent single The Devil's Crayon, for instance, takes XTC's Love On A Farm Boy's Wages, whoops and growls all over it, and proceeds to make it shuffle in astonishment, while Please Sir may be the only barbershop madrigal to make it into the shops ever, and the astonishing Woebegone Wanderers blossoms from punk-funk shimmy through waltzing operetta and into freeform minimalism over, frankly, less bars than you might've thought advisable....full text |
| Guardian |
| Wild Beasts are that dread creature, the all-male guitar band, average age 21. Yet they are as like to the standard all-male guitar band as a peacock to a warthog. Limbo, Panto is an outrageously ostentatious album: think the lascivious court of Charles II, Victorian opium dens, 1930s cabaret, the Tiger Lillies' musical Shockheaded Peter and the New York club Studio 54 at its disco peak, and you'll get the flavour of their keeling theatricality. Though they sing of such laddish preoccupations as sex (Vigil for a Fuddy Duddy), booze (Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants) and footie (Woebegone Wanderers), it's in a language - musical and verbal - as fiery and kaleidoscopic as a catherine wheel. Dominating proceedings is Hayden Thorpe's sordid falsetto. He's been compared with Antony Hegarty, but he's not that graceful, and whenever the album strives for melancholy stateliness it falls flat. But for every failure there is a song of such coruscating originality, it sends you reeling....full text |
| Uncut |
| This is the age of the overstatement. After Alex'n'Miles' turtlenecked quests, Wild Beasts are another gang of young, Northern, guitar-wielding lads gloriously refusing to conform to scruffy type. Instead, their MO is a kind of toppling music-hall melodrama, filtered through Orange Juice's foppish abandon or The Triffids' poised, preening pop. Hayden Norman Thorpe's falsetto squawk is the controversial focal point but his lust for language is equally extraordinary, applying the apparatus of Coward-esque farce to non-league football scandal on the flabbergasting mini-epic "Woebegone Wanderers". Meanwhile, the only real precedent for "She Purred While I Grrred" is the bawdy young Morrissey of "Handsome Devil"....full text |
Wild Beasts lyrics
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