From Claire, some chaps we’ve visited before…

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[6.00]Claire Biddles: Wild Beasts come from the Lake District, and its songs often feel like that landscape unfolding. Sumptuous layers of pastoral electronica building upon layers and layers of sensual voices. Driving clipped drums travelling over fields and fields and fields of synthesised chords. Appropriately named, “Wanderlust” is really suited to looking out of the window on a long-distance train. Somehow it manages to evoke a natural landscape whilst also sounding like a gothic disco record — like Arthur Russell covered by a Depeche Mode covers band. It’s deeply, deeply sexy. Wild Beasts are kinky like no others — “in the mother tongue, what’s the verb to suck?” they tease. Hayden Thorpe’s voice is high and clear, uncomfortably so. The words he sings in his pure, beautiful voice have always been a little shocking, a little uncomfortable in their kink somehow — like an unedited discovery of sexuality and life — yes, “wanderlust’.” This makes them all the more alluring, to some (to me). “Wanderlust” is deeply, deeply sexy in a kind of secret, “come into our world” way. “With us the world feels voluptuous”. Inviting you in. The closing refrain, “don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck”, uses a cliched rock ‘n’ roll mission statement for something else entirely — a declaration of otherness, of not giving a fuck about being cool, or normal, in life or desire.
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Brad Shoup: If you’re into Win Butler covering “Clocks” for a De Palma soundtrack, that’s fine, but I don’t know what else we’re going to talk about on this first date.
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Alfred Soto: Talk Talk in 1984 with the creeps amped up, Wild Beasts aren’t feral but they know how to use those Mellotron effects. “Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck,” Hayden Thorpe reminds listeners. No need.
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Iain Mew: You can look back over Jukebox past and see me struggling to get the point of Wild Beasts, but in “Wanderlust” they’ve finally hit just the right mixture of velvet and steel. The trick is that they do Hayden Thorpe’s amazing voice justice by not relying totally on it or forcing him to tone down to fit, but by coming up with a mysterious and ominous machinery of synth and distorto-choir that marches as his shadow.
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Anthony Easton: His voice is obnoxious, but the music has this melancholic ebbing and flowing that treats inertness with the possibility of movement.
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Patrick St. Michel: Chilly, gliding electro-pop that never boils over and that boasts only one really sharp barb (“don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck”). This sounds like the sort of song that would kick off an album — and surprise, that’s just what this is.
[5]

Madeleine Lee: I like the gravity of the fuzzy bass and the contrast between the beating drums and hovering synths and vocals. The lyrics seem like they were going for a similar depth through contrast (now we’re rhyming things with “voluptuous”; now we’re rhyming “fuck” and “suck”), but couldn’t pass up a chance for petty sniping, which instead just makes them sound like know-it-alls.
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David Moore: “Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck” should be the anthem (get your damn hands in your pockets) but can’t really save these Casiotones for the painfully overwrought.
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