Words With: Wild Beasts

Interview with Wild Beasts
words: Jamie Milton with Tom Fleming
Full feature to appear on gigwise.com
photo credit: Lucy Johnston // flickr

Jamie: The thing that we should talk about is ‘Two Dancers’. Have you seen the NME review (album of the week, 9/10 score)?Tom: Yeah I was slightly surprised, it’s nice that they’re taking us seriously which is cool. It was quite an in depth review.

Yeah it’s not often they give a 9 out of 10 and no matter what people say, the magazine is still taken seriously. Does it matter to you, to get good press or a good review?
The thing is it makes a difference to how many people it can reach. That’s something I’ve learnt. I mean we didn’t set out and say, “We’re gonna make a critically acclaimed album” but I’m noticing how much difference a good review makes and how much people’s opinion’s matter and how much the course of opinion matters.
Everyone’s a critic themselves. Obviously our music is the biggest extension you can have for our own opinions on music so it’s nice that it’s well received.

There’s something about Wild Beasts sound, it’s quite divisive between audiences, with Hayden’s falsetto especially but if you’ve got lots of critics championing the album it certainly will help.
Absolutely yeah, if you please everybody you like nobody. We just want to do what we want to do and people can decide for themselves. But it’s very, very nice that it’s going down so well.

Obviously the first impression is very important and a lot of people don’t take Wild Beasts too seriously the first time they set ears on them. Have you ever had any bad experiences with supporting a band where people just haven’t heard you before?
Not so many, there have been a couple, maybe. I think as far as those experiences go I think we’ve been pretty lucky. I think some bands have a really rough time when they’re supporting people. If nothing else, we’re a “sit up and pay attention” band, we have the “what the fuck” factor at least. But that’s the test this time with ‘Two Dancers’, we no longer have this “what the fuck” factor, we’re no longer a new band and we’re no longer young.

It does feel like you’ve evolved your sound quite quickly. The general consensus seems to be that you’ve matured a good five albums worth in the space of one.
That’s awesome. We learnt a lot from making the first record and we were writing as soon as it came out. The first album had quite a lot of old songs in a lot of ways, a lot of people’s first albums are like that. We’ve taken our time with this and we’ve been a lot more deliberate. We’ve taken our time to make a record with a theme, with a purpose, I suppose.

How would you describe that theme? I’ve tried to get my head round it, there’s quite a lot of melancholy and sexual references.
Yeah, they’re both dead right. The ‘two dancers’ theme that underpins it is this idea of something always being out of reach, that it’s always beyond your control, leading this formalised, abstract pattern. As if your life is proceeding without you and this album covers the joys and the frustrations of that. There’s a lot of loss and reconciliation, I suppose and it ends indefinitely, unsure. Whether the reconciliations are real of imagined it’s kind of up to the listener, I guess.
It’s kind of a more grown up record than the first one. The first one was littered with sex as well but here we’ve given a more grown up take on it. We’ve learnt that the world can be a difficult place to live in but there’s no need to wallow in that.

You yourself, you seem to feature more vocally. Was that to suit the sound a little more or was that you stamping your authority on the recording process?
Going back to the first record, I think me and Hayden realised that we’d both become two characters, representing different poles of the album. I mean, the songs are written very quickly, we only have four pairs of hands, and there was a lot of instrument swapping so that’s how the songs seemed to work. Usually if I had some lyrics, I sang them and if Hayden had some lyrics, he sang them. That was because of time constraints more than anything but it seemed to work fairly well.
All the writing is credited to Wild Beasts because it’s very much an open process.

Do you tend to write on your own and then meet up and discuss and work on the pieces?
Yeah usually songs will be preceded by something very rough and we’d try to bring it out. We practice an awful lot so we tend to play it out, each of us suggesting one thing or the other: “I see that, I’ll raise you this…”, that sort of process.
Some songs went through loads of different versions, different rhythms and arrangements. ‘Two Dancers’ (parts 1 and 2) are great examples of ideas changing throughout. The melody from those two songs reappears at the end of ‘Hooting & Howling’, which is partly based around the chords of those songs. And synth sound in those songs is very similar to the opening synth sound at the start of the album and also features in ‘This Empty Nest’ and ‘Underbelly’ later on. All the songs partly inform eachother, and that song itself became a focal idea, lyrically and musically, like ripples on a pond.

“We’re growing in confidence”

Do you want to try and different sounds and atmospherics as you move on to more records?
Well I think it’s a logical progression. For this record, we knew better than we did for the first record. We’ve got an idea where we’d like to go. To be fair, we’re growing in confidence. This was a big learning curve for us again.

Even as you progress, you’re still a very difficult band to pigeonhole. ‘Limbo, Panto’ has this very old-fashioned feel to it, this one less so. Are there any contemporary influences that help define your sound?
We listened to a lot of dance and electronic music. When we recorded, everything was done with click-tracks and we tried to incorporate dance structures, not like verse/chorus but more a slow build and slow progression. There was also an influence of dark folk music. I think it’s fair to mention bands like Junior Boys, who we’re big fans of and Talking Heads and we’ve recently discovered Talk Talk.

Structurally there are moments in a song when it will suddenly change, for example the closing section of ‘This Is Our Lot’. Do you always check a song to see if it’s interesting throughout? Do you attempt to add new things in all the time?
We definitely try and wrong-foot people and keep people on their toes. The biggest pleasure of music is surprise. Whatever type of music it is, there needs to be a shock factor, something you’re not expecting. At the same time, we try and be concise because at nature, we’re a pop band.

Favourite records:

I mean there’s obviously been a lot of fuss over the Animal Collective record and I don’t think it’s as good as some of their earlier work but I do like it.

I think there’s been a backlash towards it.
Yeah, there was so much good juice spilt over it that there eventually was a backlash. I read Everett True’s article, his attack, which seemed a bit unfair. I’m sure if we get a lot of good reviews, there will be a backlash too.

Yeah I’m sure he’ll be scribing his “defending the indefensible” article when you get popular enough.
(Laughs) I wish I could name some more records but I’m terrible with new music because I’m so busy making stuff. Oh, the new Junior Boys album, that’s excellent. It amazes me they’re not more popular, they write great pop songs. I think there’s a new Joanna Newsom record coming out this year as well which is obviously going to be an event for the wee, little indie boys like myself.

‘The fascinating ‘Two Dancers’ is out on Monday, this is what we thought of it.

mp3: Wild Beasts – The Fun Powder Plot // alt

0 people like this post.

Like