Wild Beasts
Limbo, Panto

What a mess trying to decipher Limbo, Panto. Like Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans from Harry Potter: you never know what you're going to get and if it will be hard to digest. Lots of stuff, too much.

It's an opulence never baroque for its own sake, it's rather elegance thrown in there, a bit like my political science professor likes to say, in a magmatic way. It’s an album, in its own small way, striking, it does not lend itself to being listened to frequently nor does it try to be liked after meticulous listens; however, in this debut, a certain undeniable dose of genius and a larger amount of unruliness must be recognized.

Hayden Thorpe and company delight us with layers of arpeggios and falsettos as lyrical as they are improbable, with bass on daring lines and epileptic changes of rhythm and atmosphere. It's no justice to sum up this album in a few lines, it's not easy to capture its innumerable nuances. One could start by saying that it is permeated from start to finish by a certain restlessness. Tense and acidic songs ("The Club of Fathomless Love" – "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants", the most canonical track) alternate with cryptic, wide-ranging sci-fi ballads ("Woebegone Wanderers" – "She Purred, While I Grrred" – "Cheerio Chaps, Cheerio Goodbye"). Over everything hovers a prosaic specter whose peak is reached in the enchanting “Please sir”. Honorable mention to my two favorite tracks: the trip-labyrinthine “The Devil's Crayon” and the more romantic “His Grinning Skull” which I find somehow akin to "Head Over Heels" by Tears for Fears (it reminds me perpetually of Donnie Darko and the slow-motion electric leaf-blower scene). In short, this album rocks and I give it 4 stars which is like 5 and it's not 5 for the simple fact that it is an album made up of little irreverent excesses, to be taken, even where most successful, in small doses by necessity.