If one could represent the setting in which the fourth album of the "Wild Beasts" (a name partly borrowed from the early 20th-century French painters, the Fauves, or wild beasts) moves and translate it into a single word, we could define it as "Impressionist". A pictorial metaphor that says everything and nothing at the same time, yet never so fitting as in this instance, to define the "new" music of the Kendal four. With forms and blurred yet intense and complete contours. Turner comes to mind in particular. Listening to the album, one cannot help but notice the wonderful production work, which seems to unfold with vigor and restraint new colors on the sonic canvas of the tracks. Brushstrokes of synth that suddenly overwhelm the melody and drag the listener into a musical "elsewhere" (very Eighties, to be fair) only occasionally visited by the quartet in the past. Minimal guitars, rhythmic tribalisms, and the voices of the two leaders (Thorpe's falsetto and Fleming's baritone) never so dissimilar yet complementary, intent on dialoguing, sometimes, in the same song. Musical references include Talk Talk, Bowie's B-side of "Low" and many other artists of the New Wave of the 80s, revisited however in the light of a modernism never an end in itself, but functional to the atmospheres and stories the group intends to evoke.

At the center of the scene;  scarcely illuminated by cold neon lights, of this "electronic" theater, we naturally find Hayden; a new Nijinsky under opiates, a lunar white Pierrot, who seems to come straight out of Marcel Carné's masterpiece.

And he, the "diva," once again spins the web of feelings: in "Mecca," a wonderful pagan liturgy, in the Synth Pop of "A Simple Beautiful Truth," and in "Sweet Spot" where "there's a divine state where dream and reality can complete each other". In "New Life" we encounter the Peter Gabriel of "The Rhythm Of The Heat" (year of grace 1982), and in "Past Perfect" and "Pregnant Pause," small electronic symphonies, it seems like hearing an Antony just a bit less effeminate approaching the thresholds of our heart. 

And how can we remain silent about the initial maelstrom of the overwhelming and hallucinated  "Wanderlust," a sarcastic mockery of certain Indie colleagues, ready to sacrifice even their own identity in favor of easy public success. Finally comes the ecstatic "Palace" to whisper words of redemption and hope, closing the dance (but also opening the opportunity for a life, if not "new," at least aware) of an album of rare beauty and effectiveness, capable of growing under the skin like an autonomous organism. 

Tracklist and Videos

01   Wanderlust (04:54)

02   Nature Boy (03:33)

03   Past Perfect (02:57)

04   A Dog’s Life (03:21)

05   Wanderlust (The Field remix) (08:14)

06   New Life (04:37)

07   Wanderlust (Factory Floor remix) (07:11)

08   Sweet Spot (03:59)

09   Palace (03:20)

10   Daughters (04:46)

11   Pregnant Pause (03:09)

12   A Simple Beautiful Truth (02:35)

13   Mecca (03:44)

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