Nipping at the heels of last year's debut album Limbo, Panto, Wild Beasts continue their strange and bombastic odyssey into music's darker fathoms with Two Dancers, a decidedly more mature album that advances the band's already extraordinary talents and pushes them into new territory. Wild Beasts are nothing if not unique. Lead singer Hayden Thorpe's ever-present, bawdy-yet-aristocratic falsetto spews epithets and vulgar insinuations as though they were lofty hymns, and bassist Tom Fleming (whose vocal talents are much more prominent this time around) offers a down-to-earth deadpan ring that subtly implicates his narrators in what amount to nothing more than everyday atrocities, all while following tense, galloping rhythms and vast, far-reaching melodies. This combination of musical and lyrical oddity separate Wild Beasts fully from the safety of the norm; these soulful, lilting tracks belie a sinister core bordering on the psychotic.
""Hooting and Howling"" espouses the adolescent torments of the underrepresented street brute, as the narrator describes his violent actions as ""a crude art, a bovver boot ballet / equally elegant and ugly"" and declares, ""I was as thrilled as I was appalled / courting him in fisticuffing waltz.""
""All the King's Men"" sounds at first to be nothing but a catchy lure with which to coax women into bed, and yet while this is not a rare rock 'n' roll trope, there is a menacing undertone to the narrator's words: ""And we are the boys / Who'll drape you in jewels / Cut off your hair, and throw out your shoes / Cause baby, you won't need them ... You're birthing machines / And let me show my darling what that means."" This song excels on both the level of a memorable single as well as to decry the absurdity of a courting process whose purpose is to ensnare beauty and confine it to servitude, all with incredible style and wit.
The two part title track, ""Two Dancers,"" is also replete with understated horror as it chronicles the narrator's emotional and mental state while being physically tortured by an unknown entity as the song moves from ghostly desperation to funk-laden fear and regret and back again.
The album as a whole attempts to contrast, and ultimately harmonize, the beautiful and horrible, as both criminal and victim are handled with the same exalted deference. Rare for a rock album, Two Dancers is thematically rich, attempting to explore as well as explain ""How we have an underbelly / bitten by brutality.""
Compared to Wild Beasts' previous entry, Two Dancers is a far more subdued album. Gone are the up tempo and overtly angry tracks such as ""The Club of Fathomless Love."" Instead, the album acts more as a coherent whole, with a continuous mood and tone finely interwoven between each track, making up with subtlety and consistency what it lacks in intensity. While some may be disappointed by the choice to eschew the ambivalent, emotionally raw facet Wild Beasts seemed poised to elaborate upon, Two Dancers represents a fascinating evolution for a band too bizarre to qualify, and affirms their position as one of the best and most interesting indie bands today.
