Two Dancers

I labor daily under the assumption that people want to hear about my musical favorites. It's a bit of a hold-over from my previous jobs (DJ, record store employee, album reviewer), but it's pretty hard to shake, the compulsion to impose one's musical will on an unsuspecting (and in most cases, uncaring) world.

So it is with Wild Beasts, a four-man outfit from the shores of the U.K., a band that's really hard to synopsize effectively. [My favorite take: late-era Smiths with Billy Mackenzie from The Associates as lead vocalist.] I saw them perform in a small club in downtown Pontiac last night, and they dazzled through twelve gems (although leaving "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants" out of the set list was a sad slight). Of course, the greatest thing about having access to press materials is that summations exist from people who are paid to produce such materials, so from the label's mouth:

WILD BEASTS FOLLOW UP WIDELY CELEBRATED DEBUT ALBUM WITH TWO DANCERS, OUT 9/8/09 ON DOMINO RECORDS

Wild Beasts released their critically acclaimed debut album, Limbo Panto, last November on Domino Records. The band garnered a huge amount of attention in their home country surrounding this release. They made their first live appearance in the U.S. this past March at SXSW. It was this trip that made a splash for Wild Beasts in the U.S. and really made their mark as a promising young band on the rise. Wild Beasts are quickly following up with their sophomore album, Two Dancers, a record that is surely posed to officially break them stateside. It is an album that will further prove Wild Beasts are not just an of-the-moment band who will come and go within the course of three months, but a band of young men with real staying power.

Co-produced by Wild Beasts and northern English enigma Richard Formby in remote Norfolk, UK earlier this year, Two Dancers finds Wild Beasts on fire. Its a record of tightrope-high drama, alive with its sense of possibility, a sound that shimmers and sways in the band’s own mercurial fashion. The band’s performances throughout are pure liquid energy. The needlepoint drama is a result of the band eschewing studio hyper-gloss by playing together in the room - “recorded live, no over thinking” explains Wild Beasts' Hayden Thorpe. The sound and sensation of a band, to borrow the lyric of "This Is Our Lot," "dancing late / like young reprobates". Two Dancers is a streamlined, minimalist, and user-friendly Wild Beasts, with equal grace and gusto, equally elegant and ugly.

Two Dancers is full of references to the following: booty calls, puckered lips, bodies as perfect machines, and dim-lit streets. Lyrically Two Dancers is equally energetic and ripe. In "All The King’s Men" Tom Fleming sings with purposeful intent about “Girls from Rodean, girls from Shipley, from Hounslow, girls from Whitby” as Thorpe’s falsetto soars with palpable anticipation. In this song, as on the whole of the album, Wild Beasts dare you to cut loose and be seduced, but you’ll join in on the disorientation along the way.

Wild Beasts have made a record of earthly pleasures that sounds thrillingly widescreen, open and in awe of life; equally intoxicated and disturbed by the possibilities of pleasure. Two Dancers will be released September 8th on Domino Records.

But you say you want hyperbolic press clippings? You got it:

"Wild Beasts singer Hayden Thorpe can conjure extraordinary melodrama with his voice, as he sings in high, clear tones and stretches his range into a growl with equal finesse. All the while, the rest of the band wraps his fragile, aching phrases in clean guitars and tip-toed drums. It could easily come off as overly posed or mannered, but in the English group's short career, it's already demonstrated an instinct to push past easy uses of its gifts, through both wild experimentation and subtle restraint." -- NPR.org

"Wild Beasts' debut Limbo, Panto is a soaring, singular combination of emotional abandon, frank laddishness, shimmering guitars and cabaret theatricality." -- Paste

"Underneath these filmy and seductive layers is not a band in limbo. This may be Wild Beasts' first album, but they've got a fully developed aesthetic, one that is thematically and vocally alien, but sonically, pop and conventional. Maybe a voice that bizarre needs something pretty to curl up on, but each song, whether a ballad or a romper (mostly the latter), generates enough turbulence to float with pockmarked elegance." -- Pitchfork

"Seconds 17-19: Your first taste of his extended fierceness. His voice is totally the winner on Project Runway, if it was about voices, because it’s kind of sassy and not completely polished but is unique and with some fervent and occasionally annoying persistence that it is the best." -- TheFADER.com

So go buy it already, Constant Reader.