Wild Beasts: Between a Purr and a Roar
Published in Paste, November 2008
By Kristina Feliciano
Band members: Hayden Thorpe (lead vocals), Ben Little (guitar), Chris Talbot (drums, vocals), Tom Fleming (bass, vocals)
Hometown: Kendal, a cobblestone-streeted town in England’s Lake District
Album title: Limbo, Panto (Domino)
For fans of: Kate Bush, Antony & the Johnsons, Cocteau Twins, cabaret, falsettos
The Wild Beasts were originally known as Fauve, a reference to a group of early-20th-century painters (les Fauves) whose outrageous use of bold colors marked them as true avant-gardists. The band later de-Frenchified its name, translating it to Wild Beasts “because it sounds so much more crude in English,” says singer Hayden Thorpe. But the avant-garde parallels remain: The Wild Beasts’ debut, Limbo, Panto, is a soaring combination of emotional abandon and frank laddishness, shimmering guitars and cabaret-style theatricality that is unlike anything else out there.
“I think the beauty of the music is that you can take from it what you want,” says Thorpe, noting that some people tell him they work out to the Beasts’ music while others say they play it when they’re going to sleep. “It has enough layers in it for people to cherry pick what they like.”
He and his bandmates were just beastlets at the same school (16 and 17 years of age) when they started the group in 2002, and they write as if they’re still goose-pimpled gods, to borrow a phrase from their song “Assembly.” Limbo’s lyrics vacillate between soul searching and defiant selfishness, a fraught contrast encapsulated in the last line of “She Purred, While I Grrrred”: “I want she for laundry/I want she so I’m not lonely/I want she…not matrimony.”
“Something that fascinates me is that the real macho, hard elements of men and the more vulnerable, insecure sides of them don’t ever get talked about because it’s too uncomfortable for guys to hear about,” says Thorpe.
Singing mostly in a falsetto that often recalls the wrenching, otherworldly vocals of Antony from Antony & the Johnsons, the young singer puts his own vulnerability flagrantly on show in Limbo, Panto, even though he sometimes gets flack for it. “It takes more balls to sing like this than it does to sing in some sort of half bearlike growl for half an hour,” Thorpe maintains. “And you can get away with saying more outrageous things if you sing them in a beautiful way.”