ZapTown

Although many will agree that Kendall, England’s Wild Beasts is an acquired taste, that taste is one who likes their indie rock with a degree of finesse and artistry behind it. And if you thought Limbo, Planto transcended the Wild Beasts into international indie credibility, especially with “Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants,” the release of Two Dancers has sent them into the stratosphere.

Hayden Thorpe’s distinctive falsetto echoes and shimmers throughout their new album for Domino Records while the band softly attunes elegance with a subtle sense of catchiness. Songs like “Hootin’ and Hollerin’” has just enough drum beat to make the toe tap yet left to the background to let Thorpe’s powerfully precise syllable enunciations stand out.

For the first time ever, Wild Beasts will embark on a U.S. tour in support of the new album. What they will be bringing with them is a suitcase full of talent and expression. Thorpe looks deep into the band’s psyche and talks about Two Dancers.

Links:

Official Site: http://www.wild-beasts.co.uk/
Domino Records: http://www.dominorecordco.com/

Photo by Tom Beard.

With “Two Dancers” being your sophomore album, what did you expect as you went into this recording and how did it compare to your debut?

Our first album was such an idealistic, purist thing. There were no fingers in our pie, no whispers in our ears or older brothers advising us. That was the album’s greatest triumph and it’s biggest flaw.  What ensued during and after the recording of Limbo, Panto was a systematic deconstruction of all the imagined ideas we had about being in a band and makings albums. We saw the ugly side of things, we began to notice the dark shadows that always lurked. We saw the oily, clunking cogs working behind the clean pop façade. Surprisingly, a result of all this was a real feeling of empowerment. We realized that music can be warts and all, it can be honest to the point of being flawed and be all the more endearing for it. It’s the inner workings that are the most fascinating to the listener. A photo taken of someone when they’re not looking is far more intriguing than one which is composed and prepared for. The second album is a snap shot taken when we weren’t looking. It’s a very human album made up of flaws an accidents and changes of minds and adlibs and last minute additions. I think that’s what gives Two Dancers its character. For that to happen we had no expectations or preconceptions.  We made the leap of faith to just let the album form itself, without inhibition. We allowed chance to be our guide, whether it showed our good side or our bad side. Thank fully we feel it was our good one.

I find “Two Dancers” to be so easy to listen to. With songs like “Hooting and Howling,” there seems to be a greater focus on expression and elegance for the band. Did you find it easy or difficult to work on these songs? How long did it take from the writing process to the final output, and what effect did this album have on the band?

Songs like Hooting and Howling were a result of our new found “less is more policy”. We realized that what we were striving to do was to take big complex ideas and pack them down into bite size nuggets that can be understood. There’s no point having the greatest stories in the world without having the skills to be able to tell them. Its like the daddy long legs spider famously having the most venomous poison in the world but not the fangs to administer it. So what entailed during writing was mostly a trimming of the fat, stripping away all those dysfunctional bits so all we were left with was the essence of an idea, a concentrate. Strangely enough, in being more minimalist, songs can often become more abstract and loose, which became a welcome byproduct. We were implying feelings and suggesting emotions, giving enough clues without ever letting that precious enigmatic quality slip through our fingers.

Tell me about the two-part title tracks, “Two Dancers Pt. I and II?” Why and what is its significance to the album as a whole?

Two Dancers parts one and two were placed in the middle of the album to act as a kind of hinge, they are the spine of the book if you will. What we wanted to create was a climax in part one, the first half of the album generates momentum towards this point. Part two acts as the post climax, the come down, the calm after the catastrophe. Loosely we are documenting the thrill of the chase and the eventual burn out and guilt once the hunted have been caught and butchered.

This is an album about spirit and place. How do you define the concept of “beauty” within this album? Did geographic remoteness have any effect on the recording as a whole? If so, how? Do you think the album would have been different in the hustle and bustle of a city recording studio?

What we began to understand with Two Dancers is that the slick slapstick Hollywood version of beauty and romance which we a force fed through-out out a lot of pop music attempts to please everyone without actually speaking to anyone. For better or worse we were determined to paint beauty as what is it, this contradictory, hypocritical and complex thing that comes in so many guises, many of them ugly to the naïve pallet.  In that sense it is certainly adult pop music, the knight in shining amour never quite appears to save the day for our teenage audience.
Geographic remoteness is important for one thing only, and that is to give you the space to become obsessed and overwhelmed enough by what you are working on to come close to doing justice to the ideas you have. There has to be a sort of spellbinding atmosphere when recording, you have to believe things will happen and defend against outsiders all the time. You don’t want that spell to be broken. It’s a paranoid and heightened state to be in, but that’s what albums must often entail if they are cared for enough.

Not only do you focus on how the lyrics are presented within a song, but the enunciation of the words are very important to you much like the title to “Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants,” for example. When did you become aware of this style and how did it develop?

We’ve always been eager to make music for ourselves and make music that represents where we come from and the experiences we have had. In that sense there’s a constant source of material for us. There’s a romance and atmosphere to huge part of life in Northern England which has never really been plundered. We take language and delivery used in every day life and use it in a sort of comic strip way. Creating larger than life characters, versions of others and ourselves that are magnified one thousand times. I probably first became aware that even the most mundane things can be fantastical through The Smiths and how they depicted a grey two-dimensional world that I recognized and understood. Importantly I could also recognize the joy and unique thrill that could be found in these circumstances.

Would you consider yourself more of an auteur than a lyricist or the other way around? Or both? Why?

I hate the word lyrics, because its word that has come to give license to so much lazy writing. So many dud lines and over used verses have been defended as being lyrics. The way I see it is if you are going to write words then the chances are your going to have to perform those words over and over, explain those words, defend them, have them sung back at you, have them pulled this way and that. The only rock you have to cling to is the fact that it represents you or at least says something valuable about you. Having said that, people write songs for different reasons and who am I to judge?

You seem to be drawn to dramatic concepts. What influences you to those and your inspirations regarding them?

I don’t think our subject matters are particularly dramatic. We are drawn to those taken for granted elements of life, those subtle moments that aren’t really recognized. What is real and what is imagined is often blurred. It’s our job to take those fleeting incomprehensible things that can’t really be talked about in everyday life and put them into song. I think that’s why songs are so important to people. They give rhyme and reason to things that can’t really be explained. It is once those small moments have been documented that they seem huge and dramatic. Art forever has the ability to make the smallest thing seem so grandiose and important.
The band has some of the most expressive music videos I have seen in a long time? What importance do you find in them and tell me about your latest one for “All The King’s Men” that was recently released?

The “All the King’s Men” video drew from the voyeuristic sinister element of that song. The perverse sexuality in our songs have been partly invented by us and partly invented by others for us. We drew the outline, but others colored it in. We decided to sort of capitalize on that and went for the sexy girls video we’d always dreamed of.  Videos are an indulgent, secondary thing, but they allow you to interact with public opinion of you. They are a tool and we try to use them as such.

I find it difficult to sing along to a Wild Beasts song. I get your music stuck in my head, but it’s not really the song so much as it is the “sense” of the song. Do you get that observation much? If so, what is your impressions over your music in relation to this? Is it a good thing for you that we should just be casual appreciators over your music (like a piece of art or wine) than to physically immerse ourselves within the songs like so many other bands?

It would be pretty fickle of me to give guidelines as to how our music should be appreciated. I don’t think there is any right way or any wrong way to appreciate Wild Beasts. What I would say is that we tend not to have many casual appreciators, we don’t really exist close enough to the centre to get away with that. People seem to make a decision on us like you would a person undergoing speed dating. Which works for us, if you want in, great, welcome, there’s much here for you. If not, don’t worry, but you won’t find us editing ourselves for more casual consumption. We like to see ourselves as a full-blooded mouthful.

Where do you go from here?

Who knows? The never quite knowing is certainly part of the thrill and draw to this occupation. We’ll be touring the US in February that is a certainty. We go from West Coast to East Coast. Lets see where we go from there.