I've been meaning to write about Wild Beasts' Two Dancers for some time now. The band have just been announced as one of the acts playing St Jerome's Laneway Festival, here in Melbourne, in January next year. I'm currently crossing every bit of my anatomy that can possibly be crossed that they'll also play a side-show somewhere. I am, after all, too old to be doing with Festivals. Bad sound, over-priced beer and all that sun. These days, of course, they also tend to be full of drugged up Gen Yers in skinny black jeans, wearing pre-faded T-Shirts emblazoned with cultural milestones they are too young to have experienced or places they've never actually been. Call me narrow minded but anyone under thirty is too dense to give the time of day. It's also a delicious irony that the 80's, a time for which I have some affection, are widely lamented as the decade that good taste forgot and yet it seems to me that the vast majority of current yoof cultcha seems to be aping that very decade in some way- whether it's the fashion (those stovepipe jeans and the faux pre-loved Ghostbusters T-Shirts) or, most especially, the music. Mind you, I'm sure a sizeable chunk of Generation Y think that, like, that band Joy Division are, like, really ripping off Interpol... That's if they've even heard of Joy Division. They don't even know they've been born, as some old geezer once said in an add for a certain multi-national burger chain.
Anyway, where was I? Wild Beasts fabulous recent record- which is, of course, heavily influenced by the 80's. See, there is method in my madness, if you just stick with me. The influences here aren't the usual suspects, however, but acts like The Smiths and Orange Juice. This is clever (though it never rubs your face in it), knowing, literate pop music. Sample lyric, from the album opener, The Fun Powder Plot: "This is a booty call/ My boot up your arsehole! This is a Freudian slip/ My slipper in your bits!" Hilarious but also slightly menacing over the burbling synth and and minor key guitar accompaniment. I should also add that the same track brings into play what might be a deal breaker for many- the falsetto of lead vocalist, Hayden Thorpe. I'm generally not a big fan of your squeaky, male vocal and I did find bits of their previous record (debut Limbo Panto) heavy going. Here, he seems to have reigned some of the vocal gymnastics of that first effort. He is also added and abetted by the deeper tones of fellow band-member, Tom Fleming (who provides backing vocals and even lead on a couple of tracks), for the first time.
Two Dancers seethes with lust and violence. "A crude Art/ A bovver boot ballet/ Equally elegant and ugly," runs a line from lead single, Hooting and Howling. While later, in We've Still Got The Taste Dancin' On Our Tongues, "Us kids are cold and cagey/ Rattling around the town/ Scaring the oldies into their dressing gowns/ As the dribbling dogs howl." Sounds like Melbourne on a Friday night- and, damn it, just how I feel about those bloody Gen Yers! This is all accomplished very tunefully and with spare, crystalline production- the nihilism and rage or the more powerful for being carried by such melodic and restrained music.
Every time I buy a CD, I secretly hope it will turn out to be one of those select few that I hold close to my heart- or, at the very least, never tire of hearing. Two Dancers is actually one of those records.
No comments:
Post a Comment