This is the age of the overstatement. After Alex’n’Miles’ turtlenecked quests, Wild Beasts are another gang of young, Northern, guitar-wielding lads gloriously refusing to conform to scruffy type.
Instead, their MO is a kind of toppling music-hall melodrama, filtered through Orange Juice‘s foppish abandon or The Triffids‘ poised, preening pop.
Hayden Norman Thorpe’s falsetto squawk is the controversial focal point but his lust for language is equally extraordinary, applying the apparatus of Coward-esque farce to non-league football scandal on the flabbergasting mini-epic “Woebegone Wanderers”.
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Meanwhile, the only real precedent for “She Purred While I Grrred” is the bawdy young Morrissey of “Handsome Devil”.
SAM RICHARDS
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