Wild Beasts, Newcastle Cluny

Wild Beasts

March 19, 2010

You may or may not have noticed it in the last year or so, but we here at Muso’s Guide are quite fond of  Wild Beasts. After a raft of thoroughly deserved acclaim for their second album Two Dancers (including their capturing of the number one spot in our writers’ collective top 50 of 2009, and the Editor’s), the Kendalians’ bandwagon is trundling merrily on with their current tour in support of the single release of ‘We Still Got the Taste Dancin’ On Our Tongues’. Ably supported by the darkly captivating work of  Lone Wolf, and Erland and the Carnival, whose bouncy, mildly pyschedelic pop invokes the untethered sense of adventure shown by the early recordings of The Coral, Wild Beasts are quite clearly in the form of their lives.

So good are they, in fact, that you don’t even feel all that hacked off that the Cluny is so ludicrously rammed that you aren’t quite sure whose pocket you just put your hand in, or what might be causing that disconcerting trickle running down your back.

It is amost beyond debate that on record Wild Beasts are a band capable of breathtaking elegance, both in the lush structure of their music and the lunatic world portrayed by their lyrics. What makes tonight so enjoyable is that the grace of the songs is not only enhanced with a terrifyingly tight performance, but it is also infused with an extra sense of boisterousness which is massively contagious. The otherworldly quality of the songs could make it easy for the band to appear almost inhuman, but they don’t just disappear into their pantomime world of Dickensian depravity, they externalise it, bringing it to life with such gusto that even the hardest of hearts would struggle not to warm to them.

The thing which jumps out at most people when they first encounter Wild Beasts is the extraordinary timbre of the vocals, both in Hayden Thorpe’s insane falsetto (which has a knack of reaching such monumental peaks that even Matt Bellamy might consider it all a bit much) and in Tom Fleming‘s warm, rich baritone. The interplay between the two is sometimes spellbinding, and both are in fantastic fettle this evening. Their voices are wonderful foils for the music, and vice versa, a major factor in the quality of the recorded output, and even more so in a live setting, especially a tight little venue like the Cluny.

The setlist is quite heavy on Two Dancers, which is understandable really given that it is barely six months since the record saw its release. That it feels like so much longer that is a testament to the ageless quality of the record. Tonight illustrates that Wild Beasts are not a band to confine their mesmeric qualities to the recording studio, they are able to translate them in their live performance, and with every day that goes by they show themselves to be one of the most extraordinarily special bands we possess.

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