WILD BEASTS - Two Dancers

This art-rock quartet are like a staring contest that you're destined to lose. Wild Beasts pout and preen to such a degree that, upon first listen, you're convinced that it must be some kind of put-on—that all you have to do is wait it out. To their enduring credit, though, that moment never comes, because the group wasn't joking to start with.

Okay, no band that writes the already-immortal couplet of "This is a booty call/My boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your asshole" can be without a sense of humour, but the music on Two Dancers is definitely serious business: as another line from that same song, "The Fun Powder Plot", intones, it is played "with courage and conviction".

Two Dancers is indeed a very brave record, combining the taut grooves of mid-period Talking Heads and crisp, clarion guitar work with a devotion to falsetto that would've made Jeff Buckley blush. This bravery comes not so much from the mixture of the elements themselves, but from the seething steeliness with which it's delivered. When singer/guitarist Hayden Thorpe wails "Watch me! Watch me!" in "All The King's Men", it's with a bravado rarely attributed to a falsetto vocal. And while second vocalist/bassist Tom Flemming's voice is the soothing, crooning tenor that helps ensure a domesticity in their sound, this band is far from tame. Peculiar and confident, Two Dancers is one of the most inexplicably intoxicating and original records you'll hear all year.