Ink Up The Wound For A Crude Tattoo

Wild Beasts “Bed of Nails”

“Sensual” is a very tacky word, but in the very best way, it is appropriate for describing Wild Beasts’ third album Smother. The band’s previous records were more obvious in their charms, but this album is very subtle in its pleasures. It lures you in, it gradually seduces you with its luxurious, wonderfully complex melodies, rhythms and textures. Even more so than Two Dancers, Smother is a feast of elegantly crafted sounds. It feels wrong to try to pick this music apart on a technical level — this is such delicate, evocative stuff that it’d be a shame to spoil the magic.

As on the last two Wild Beasts records, the most striking element of the band is the contrast of singers Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming. This time around, Fleming’s voice conveys patient lust and vulnerability — he mainly sings about being broken and lost, and needing someone to fill a void within himself. Thorpe, the more flamboyant and operatic of the two, is the aggressor. He’s still obsessed with the grotesque aspects of masculinity and the primal, violent aspects of sex.

In “Bed of Nails,” the album’s finest song, he splits the difference between he and Fleming’s lyrical concerns and arrives at the thematic center of the record. Thorpe makes two allusions in this song: First, to Shakespeare’s mad, beautiful Ophelia, and then to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I’m especially fond of how he works in the latter. As the song reaches its climax, he characterizes the love between these two broken people as Frankenstein’s monster, i.e., when they come together, this awkward, strange creature comes to life.

Buy it from Amazon.