Despite being the band behind two of my album's of the year, I never found the time to review the past two Wild Beasts albums, even though, no surprises, they're one of my absolute favourite bands, ever.
Best described as Kate Bush's eccentricities with David Bowie at his most flamboyant and moulded into indie-rock, the Kendal four-piece have come far from their baroque-pop debut but still retain all the gratuitous amount of clever wordplay and vocal performances that craft them as a strange but unique band amongst their more generic compadres.
Despite believing the band couldn't shift into a more mainstream pop sound, even after their fourth album Present Tense, Wild Beasts' fifth album Boy King, fully immerses itself in the genre.
The electronica instrumentation's often mix with heavier bass lines and more simplistic percussion and, whilst it's nothing particularly new to the genre, it's Hayden Thorpe's occasional vulgarity behind his falsetto and Tom Fleming's strikingly contrasting baritone that separate it from their new contemporaries.
The album kicks off with the superb Big Cat; a slow build with the occasional samples of electronic guitar, Thorpe's breathy but quick vocals hiding the lyrics describing a fine but unattainable male specimen, but deliver a catchy chorus declaring "Big cat top of the food chain".
The album's first truly headbanging moment arrives immediately after with Tough Guy; a concoction that starts with the provocative hook of "Now I'm all fucked up and I can't stand up so I better suck it up, like a tough guy would" before the second half fills with blitzing guitar riffs and repeating the hook like a mantra.
The album bounces from the sharp shocks but offers occasional respite. Dead centre on the album is Celestial Creatures; a catchy three minute pop-rock number with an additional minute long outro of samples, piano keys and vocals.
Fleming's first of two tracks with him on lead vocals 2BU arrives immediately after; stylistically similar to Present Tense's Daughters with more electronic drumming and catchier synths and whilst a tad too long, it still features a catchy vocal performance and nice bridge where Fleming sings a list of demands and threats.
Whilst the album's first half is made up of the more accessible material, the second sees a couple of sprinklings of radically different songs. Whilst the aforementioned 2BU might again, bears more than a passing resemblance to Daughters, the other Fleming led song Ponytail is entirely unique.
Using pitch altered vocal samples as instrumentation, the song begins as something nearly, like a Smother left-over, but then shifts into a catchy pop number with Thorpe providing dualing vocals later on to create an unusual, but wholly satisfying song.
Lyrically, the album according to the band is an analysis on masculinity and, like every Wild Beasts album before it, Boy King revels in lust and the occasional shock lyric hidden behind vocal delivery. My current favourite song on the album Eat Your Heart Out Adonis treats the Greek god's stature of desire as incomparable to Thorpe's appetite for passion.
Alpha Female in the meanwhile treats the proverbial alpha female as an uncontrollable force of nature, with Thorpe promising to only stand behind her. Lead single Get My Bang meanwhile, whilst apparently being about consumerism, lists how far a pairing will go to get their proverbial bang (including "making megafauna" and "goin' darker ages").
Whilst the album is a sonically loud and dare I say, disorientating journey, it's ending is a slow and beautiful addition to the band's discography called Dreamliner. Mostly just Thorpe and instruments that make the song sound like a lullaby, the synths at the start of Get My Bang return at the three-quarter mark but the song continues at a gentle pace as the album closes.
Whilst I had full confidence in Wild Beasts producing another solid album, Boy King represents an unusual step in the band's sound that, whilst again, not entirely original, still carries the stylistic traits and habits that made the band such an underrated one.
Sonically, the album is cluttered with layers of altered pitches, quick fades and a much appreciate use of guitars to give the album some much needed bite. For those who crave the band being as loud and flamboyant as much as they can be soft and reserved, it's nearly forty minutes of unadulterated, great pop music with more substance than other similar and familiar releases.
Whilst it's a certainty that the album will probably turn off a significant portion of the band's fans who fell in love with the eccentric baroque pop crooners of yesteryear, Boy King is a depraved, sexual and sonically magnificent album from the boys from Kendal and, in a year of exceptional music releases; one of it's best.
9/10
H
@Retcon_Nation
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