The most pointed critique of contemporary indie rock is that the genre has calcified into an unthreatening stylistic form, while its perpetual sexlessness has metastasized into a regressive form of twee infantilization. English four-piece Wild Beasts has successfully resisted those trends, penning a body of unconventional work that is preoccupied with the tense power dynamics and negotiations of the bedroom.
Though the band has always excelled at meticulously arranged, nearly theatrical explorations of sexual relations, nothing on 2008’s Limbo, Panto or 2009’s Two Dancers suggested the baroque interiority of the band’s latest release, Smother. To an insistent beat, Hayden Thorpe’s operatic vocals careen through an elegant yet claustrophobic haze of muted guitar and synthesizer tones, while bassist and vocalist Tom Fleming’s lower register serves as a ominous counterpoint.
While their peers are intent on chasing the Arcade Fire’s coattails, Wild Beasts are making difficult and challenging music that is deceptively enveloping. As Fleming explains, the band defies expectations by design. “We’re four skinny white boys,” he says, “which people have seen before, so we spend a lot of time trying to subvert what a band should look and sound like.”
Nothing else in contemporary rock sounds quite like Smother. And while the band’s previous albums were far from balls-to-the-wall rock extravaganzas, the album still represents a radical inward turn for the band. “We spent a lot of time on tour playing rock shows,” says Fleming. “We’ve kind of exhausted the original drive behind making that kind of sound. We had an intention to bring it back to the interior, and focus on texture and tone and atmosphere. You can’t design that, but you can create the conditions for it.”
Drawing inspiration from minimalist composer Steve Reich and the ambient work of Aphex Twin, Wild Beasts were intent on deconstructing arrangement while still servicing the songs at the core. “We are ultimately songwriters, but we wanted that abstraction, where songs are sort of marooned in texture,” Fleming says. “It’s very easy to retreat into solipsism when making more ambient music, but we’re trying to make collective, communicative music.”
Though the band has been pegged as a bunch of romanticist lotharios, this latest work has a sinister fascination with the curdling of desire and its intertwined relationship with fear and power. In album opener “The Lion’s Share,” Thorpe sings, “It’s a terrible scare, but that’s why the dark is there: so you don’t have to see what you can’t bear.” Throughout the album, the band unflinchingly explores sexuality in all its discomfiting complexity, without succumbing to the aggressive caricatures that pop music usually employs. “There’s more violence to these songs than people are seeing,” says Fleming. “The lyrics and sounds are a lot more violent than what we’ve made in the past. We’re hiding a lot in these love songs.”
The violence Fleming speaks of is largely of the intimate, psycho-sexual variety. If the band’s previous music was unfettered by consequences and bordering on hedonistic, Smother delves into the unspoken psychological and emotional negotiations of sexual relationships. The band is circling around familiar fundamental themes but approaching them from a very different place. “[Sex] is a preoccupation, to be honest,” says Fleming. “All our favorite writers, at their core, write about the same thing over and over again.”
Fortunately for the band, there’s plenty of fertile ground to work. “When you start talking about sexuality, what it does to people, it anchors you to a very heavy thing. We’re focused on dignifying a lot of the stuff that isn’t talked about.”
WILD BEASTS
Tuesday, Oct. 11 at 8pm at the Rio
Ticketes $20 adv/$24 door
