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Wild Beasts - Present Tense (2014)

Posted By: varrock
Wild Beasts - Present Tense (2014)

Wild Beasts - Present Tense (2014)
MP3 CBR 320 kbps | Tracks: 11 | 40:56 min | 100 Mb
Style: Electronic, Indie | Label: Domino Records

Wild Beasts' fourth album begins exactly as you might expect a Wild Beasts album to. There's a waterfall of processed voices, like a crowded bar with the background chatter sung, a determined, quick-eyed rhythm, out there and looking for prey. The twin voices of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming singing of 'Wanderlust'… "there's a feeling that I've come to trust… don't confuse me for someone who gives a fuck". But is it so simple?

Present Tense is a markedly different creature from their first three albums, and especially a significant move forward from 2011's Top 20 LP Smother. Since then, Thorpe, Fleming, Ben Little and Chris Talbot have headed down the M1 to become London residents, and here work for the first time without long-term producer and collaborator Richard Formby. Instead, on a record largely free of guitars, musical polymath Leo Abrahams and Alex 'Lexxx' Dromgoogle (whose name sounds like a Wild Beasts lyric from 2008) take the helm. When I interviewed Wild Beasts about the recording of Present Tense for Q magazine, Tom Fleming insisted that "we have no compulsion whatsoever to make adult pop", but that's rather what this is. Thoughtful, self-aware, graceful, going somewhere, no longer entirely obsessed on the carnality of youth and the darker ends of male desire.

As such, anyone hoping for a repeat of Smother's neo-disco might be disappointed. This is a far more reflective affair, with the lyrical gymnasium packed away. A good thing - if they'd continued writing lines that pranced so high their balls had a habit of dropping out of their shorts, then Wild Beasts would have become boring very quickly; all panto, no limbo.

Then again, where do Wild Beasts fit in now? This is not rock music. This is not indie music. I'd like it to be pop music, and it should be, but one blast of commercial radio in a local shop will tell you that's just not permitted. It's Wild Beasts to the core, no matter what they're consciously and openly borrowing from the past, or from the endless journeys through the song tunnel of YouTube that they say took place during the recording. The audible trip back to the 80s and 90s isn't revivalist or nostalgic, though. Instead, the camp energies of synth pop have been harnessed to the core Wild Beasts strengths of a solid rhythm section and a gimlet eye. They've confessed that the voluptuous synths of 'Mecca' are a cheeky thieving from Haddaway's 'What Is Love?', and they're occasionally channelling the same smooth energies as Gayngs did on the flawed Relayted a few years back - flawed because as soon as I saw that band live it was abundantly clear they were the ironic bro-off that I'd defended them against. No such flimsy frippery here, for Wild Beasts are deadly serious, something that comes across both lyrically and in the strength of the arrangements, the thought that's gone into the juxtaposition of rough and skin-soft sonics throughout. Similarly, the influences from contemporary R&B and pop bleed in seamlessly.

Tracklist:

01. Wanderlust
02. Nature Boy
03. Mecca
04. Sweet Spot
05. Daughters
06. Pregnant Pause
07. A Simple Beautiful Truth
08. A Dog s Life
09. Past Perfect
10. New Life
11. Palace