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Single Reviews
Single Review: Wild Beasts – Hooting & Howling (Domino Records)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 3 August 2009
“We’re just brutes hoping to have a hoot” sings Hayden Thorpe, before continuing with the chorus lyrics, “hooting and howling”. Both animalistic and noble, Wild Beasts succinctly illuminate the duality of human nature. Our most base desires form, and are acted on, like those of wild beasts, simply hooting and howling. Yet it is our ability to understand and make such things eloquent that sets us apart. We are all “equally elegant and ugly”, as Thorpe puts it. This too is mirroredin the music, particularly in Chris Talbot’s percussion where African influenced rhythms offset the far more metrical bass line. Again the ethereal quality to the Benny Little’s guitar sound is a perfect transference of the theoretical into the real, conferring real power into the often abstract lyrics. Though it is, as always, the lyrics and their delivery that really catch you when listening to Wild Beasts. ‘Hooting & Howling’ allows the Leeds based four-piece another chance to sketch their comic picaresques, and with Hayden Thorpe’s characteristic falsetto it becomes an arresting work of infinite imagination. And while reminiscent in many ways of their extraordinarily inventive debut ‘Limbo, Panto’, ‘Hooting & Howling’ is a progression on the theme, and does them considerable justice. SJS
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