In the spirit of rehashing old material for new eyes, as is the warrant of this business, I'm continuing my digging up of elderly pieces from earlier this year with a twist - there's two of them in this post. Ooooooooooh!
Sometimes a band is good enough to warrant two articles of differing feel and content, not just one. Being able to spread the content of an interview across two outlets takes some energy and no small amount of confidence. Below, Wild Beastts get the dual article treatment. See what you think.
There are times when you begin to wonder if the heartfelt, nerve-tingling passion you feed into your creative endeavours – or in this case, into discussing other people’s efforts, which you admire – is ever appreciated. Certainly little remuneration comes from the majority of your own exploits, whilst your emotional responses to them, and anything that affects their proliferation, is usually dismissed as fanaticism. You’re a fan. I’m a fan. We’re all fans. Damn our eyes. So let me say precisely what I mean and stop mincing these seemingly effortless words into anything remotely fanciful. Wild Beasts have crafted an incredible pop record which turns out to be one of my favourites of the year of our Lord, 2009AD.
What brings this writer to such a dramatic conclusion is not only contained within the music, but is also espoused by the very protagonists in the creation of Two Dancers.
“We still have the ideals of the first record and they’re in the second record. It’s just that we’ve got better at fufilling those ideals and fundamentally we do call ourselves pop and in a way, that’s a rock for us to cling to. It keeps us in a place and I think everyone needs that. It’s harder to simplify things. It’s actually quite a skill to make things simpler,” explains Hayden Thorpe, guitarist and possessor of a larynx capable of that resplendent falsetto. Remarkably, the attempt to rid their music of complication has rendered their second full-length album a dense, lush and decadent listen. Brooding, elegiac in places, savage yet subtle, the full-on bellowing impact of debut Limbo, Panto has been replaced by elegance and eroticism.
“I think with the first record there was a huge amount of, to put it badly, teenage angst. A lot of frustration of ‘fuck, we’re doing something different here and this should be listened to’,” says Hayden. “Everybody thinks that what they do should be listened to and we were no different. Once we made a splash, as it were, we allowed ourselves to float a little and that was enjoyable.”
Tom Flemming, the baritone yin to Hayden’s yang, has reflected upon the past year’s experiences: “I think we do try and live in the now. I think we’re aware that we have to take charge of where we are now and take ownership of what we’re doing and look within ourselves to see what we’ll do next. There are all sorts of different ways we could jump now but there’s only one way we will jump and that’ll be decided in the moment, not in the abstract. I think that’s what this album is as well. It was done in the moment, in the practice room. It’s kind of thematic but that happened naturally. It wasn’t a framework it just became that one song begat another.”
Making a tangible distinction between the processes and motives of records just a year apart is tough enough, without the musicality being so different. Two Dancers is merely an evolution and yet it’s revelatory in the weaving of vocal cadences and nuances, gentile musicianship and indelible conviction.
“We learnt a lot about ourselves on the first record and we wanted, if not to make a definitive statement this time round, to just make a record that states a certain period and what we were capable of rather than one that defined us.”
It’s brave to keep ambition at bay and simply record a set of songs that speaks volumes, but allows the artist breathing room. Their two albums are almost at opposite ends of the spectrum, but still resolutely sound like Wild Beasts. For a band to act so surreptitiously, to expand their palette for their listeners and themselves, and STILL make a record that captures your ears, and by extension your heart, is warmly welcomed.
“I’ve been surprised by how many people have actually liked it,” admits Tom, perhaps too modestly. “I think I expected a similar reaction to the first one which was some devotees and a lot of shrugging. With this it’s like ‘oh my God, something’s happening’! I have allowed myself to enjoy it as well because it’s quite rare. We’ve found out what people think of it and most people have been really positive. It’s quite humbling and quite touching because we did what we thought was right and it turns out other people think it’s right too. We didn’t try to make a shining example of who we are, we just made a record.”
Delightfully, the very reasons we love the record could well be the same ones that prevent you from listening more than once. The languishing instrumentation, the distinctive vocal timbres and ideas, the relatively sedate pace, the rampant yet somehow quaint lyricism are all key components of Two Dancers.
“I think we’re walking a very thing line with fire on either side,” expresses Tom. “That’s what it should be. It should have that kind of obscureness and elusiveness All my favourite music is elusive. All my favourite art and literature. It doesn’t tell you what to think. It refuses to judge things. If you think we’ve done something that even has a modicum of that then that’s a really nice thing of you to say.”
Should great art be elitist? Should the best pop music seem unattainable, somehow thoroughly connected to itself and no zeitgeist or trend? Should making your art simpler mean it has to sound simple? Should we even be asking questions about something that is, in the end, ethereal but derived from corporeal means?
Wild Beasts accept that there are no straight answers and that the urge to produce music that sounds like this is, really, the only true consideration. Similarly, this stream of verbosity and prose is nothing but a need to enthuse about the music being made by these four young men. Anything else is a bonus.
Brad Barrett
There aren’t many bands who make a thundering impression on your grey matter so deep that you question your very taste in music. There are even fewer who abandon the crater they’ve made and spend time weaving their obvious strengths into something even more insidious and unshakable.
Wild Beasts could easily fit this description though. Last year’s debut Limbo, Panto introduced careful listeners to the extraordinary and ferocious, screaming falsetto of Hayden Thorpe. It seems Hayden and co-vocalist Tom Flemming didn’t realise how divisive it might be.
“We thought people would be like ‘oh, that’s a nice record, I’ll come and see you’. Instead it became this debate going on: is it shit? Is it great?” says Tom, perhaps overestimating the public’s exposure to wildly different styles of music.
“It’s an empowering situation because so much music passes over you,“ points out Hadyen. Still, it could be concluded that the arrival of their second record, Two Dancers, and its more subtle, far denser sound so soon after Limbo, Panto was a rush to get away from what caused such a fuss. Then again, that conclusion is almost definitely wrong.
“There was never any doubt that we were gonna release an album a year after,” confirms Hayden. “There was, and still is, a sense of urgency about trying to capture something right now. It’s a personal complex that we probably share together, that we’re missing the point right now. Yesterday was a day we could’ve used to do something better than what we did.”
“You have to be able to capture a period in time and just get something down. There’s the importance of work, we’ve always had that in the recording process. Whatever you’re going to do you kinda have to by art and by labour. You put the work in and the art will follow,” explains Tom.
“It’s a worry. It’s something we lose sleep over,” confesses Hayden rather candidly. “In that sense we take it seriously. It’s a sense of knowing what we can achieve and you’ve got to worry to achieve that. If you put the hours in you increase your chances of it happening. There is this ruthless level of possibility and the beauty of being a band is that there are no limits.”
This bubbling cauldron of pressure and lust for life is not only to be admired but is reflected in Two Dancers; specifically the eerie contrast of textures against the gentle, almost quaint, eroticism of the lyrics. It’s a record that lures you in, almost lazily, or as Haydn puts it: “I think of it a bit like a Trojan horse where we built a good facade to let people in and once people are in, or once we’re in, we stick the knife in.” Because once you’re hooked you’re sifting through the sophisticated sounds, eager to try and get to the heart of what’s here, what makes this four piece really tick and their music work so deftly. You may be searching for some time.
“It’s a complete balancing act. A lot of the songs on the album had four or five versions because it took that level of control to make it work. A lot of the time we are singing about quite ugly things and to doll them up and make them pretty is the ultimate goal but it’s a difficult thing to do and sometimes we do fall flat on our faces but that’s part of the fun of it,” Hayden says.
Most revelatory though, bearing in mind the intensity, intelligence and ambition on offer here, is the experimentation going on, and finding sounds which are far bigger than the modest means they come from.
My example to Hayden and Tom, the three of us sitting in the lovely Shoreditch bar, The Reliance, is on When I’m Sleepy – a brooding, shimmering track that features the line ‘You’re the lips for me to pucker’. At the climax of the track, three chords are slashed out and one note swells into an aching, yearning feedback note. Not what you’d put on a normal pop song really.
“What is a normal pop song?” Hayden asks.
“Don’t forget, Purple Haze did that,” retorts Tom before turning to his bandmate. “You did that and I thought at the time ‘ah I wish I was playing that!’. Everyone who’s ever picked up a guitar wants to do that.”
“I personally find it very difficult to capture what goes on because that minute moment was simply because of a split second decision in a guitar shop a few years earlier: should I get the safe guitar or get the daft big hollow body one? Every day split second moments go into it and that’s the human side to it.”
Having already discussed the importance of the human side of their music – the fact that Two Dancers consists of songs finished in a maximum of 10 takes each rather than the 50 or 60 for some of Limbo, Panto, all played pretty much live in a room together - they also worked on finding yet another contrast in a record full of them: “We got more interested in sound and production so it was fun to try and find some alien sounds. We talked about how we wanted more of that coldness against that human warmth.”
“The cheapness of When I’m Sleepy… is incredible. There’s a synth sound in it that is literally my 5 year old laptop straight into a mixing desk. It’s not a luxury sound. We worked within our limitations,” says Tom.
“I’ve got to admit, I was listening to our album on the plane the other day and on Hooting and Howling, listening to it with fresh ears because I’ve been on holiday, I didn’t have a clue what that piano sound is!”
Tom steps in: “I know we used a £50 keyboard on the harp setting. That keyboard is all over the record. It does all the really big stuff, even the darker songs. It’s just what you have to hand. I read an interview with Madlib recently and he was talking about how he never uses more than $250 of equipment. It’s just like: how do you make THAT out of only that? Again, it’s the human element. It’s what you do with your hands.”
“The Hooting and Howling piano noise is the stage piano put into a tape echo, through a driven amp in a toilet with a condenser mic on it, just for the record.”
Essentially though, Two Dancers – a record that will be dismissed by some no doubt as too slow, not musically diverse enough or even boring musically, and to those people we say ‘you really aren’t listening are you?’ – is the sound and result of a band living life, grasping the moment while its here and doing whatever they can to make a record and not some far flung statement.
“I think honestly we had nothing to lose,” concludes Tom. “We had lots of ideas fermenting and we were saving them and this is our chance. That sounds like it was a big decision but it’s not. It was very easy and very natural in a lot of ways. By which I mean it was a lot of work and hours but it wasn’t some existential crisis.”
“I think what most art, novels and painting involves is that just doing it is enough. You don’t need anymore than that. You don’t think about the result of it. You just do it. Everyone needs a purpose don’t they and that became our purpose,” finishes Hayden. “Oh, and we were being paid for it,” he adds with a smirk. With a sense of humour topping off an irresistible sense of adventure and desire to grasp life by the throat, Wild Beasts are far more than you expected them to be.
Brad Barrett
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