Review: Wild Beasts, Present Tense

By Emmett H Robinson Smith

The title is no joke: From the very first unsettling drum hits of Present Tense, the new album from Wild Beasts, it's clear that this is an album sure to be packed with turbulence. By the time you notice the swirl of the operatic synthesizer, you're surrounded. Hayden Thorpe's lyrics in this song, "Wanderlust", are both defiant and powerful: he knows he's pulled you in. "Now that you answer to me/I'll tell you how I want to feel", he sings.

What's perhaps most striking about Present Tense, among many other things, is the band's ability to sound at once primal and futuristic. In an interview with FaceCulture, Thorpe said that computers yield “great possibilities, but with great possibilities comes great danger”. So it makes sense that the man himself is struggling to find an artistically viable balance between the natural and the technological. Take, for example, "Nature Boy", the album's second track. The song begins with tribal, mesmerizing bongos and a single tremulous synth. However, these ever-present elements soon are assaulted by a decaying, lower-register synth blast. The percussion begins to clatter and harmonious backup vocals join in to complement Tom Fleming's lush baritone. The song unfolds itself until a perfect, richly layered storm is concocted. This internal contradiction between the primal and the futuristic is in and of itself tension-inducing, further playing to the album's title.

                Fleming described the album as “a response to the overload of information we get today”. This is embodied in songs like “Daughters”, in which a relentless shaker-inflected percussion beat doesn’t let up over the course of the song. This sparse instrumentation becomes gently crowded with other elements: echoey voices, the odd hi-hat, and richly layered string synthesizers. However, the song’s feeling of bareness and vulnerability in the face of intricate instrumentation is what gives Fleming’s comment so much significance. In an age where we hide behind tweets and facebook photos, our sense of vulnerability and nakedness is at an all-time high.

                What is perhaps the album’s mantra can be seen in a later track, “Past Perfect”. We see Wild Beasts utilizing a retro Daft Punk-y rhythm guitar that the electronic duo made so massive with last year’s Random Access Memories.  However, Thorpe seems to carry more qualms about this revival of the past: “It’s tense for me / can’t live within a memory” he moans. This subtle addition of rhythm guitar is part of what makes the album such a cohesive listening experience, despite its contradictions: The past is present; that is, it is being used in the present tense. The band’s members are indeed presently tense about it, but they seem to find – presently at least – some sense of tranquility about this revival in the album closer, “Palace”. The plinking guitar and nostalgic synth arrangement complements Thorpe’s words of acceptance: “We may be savage and raw, but at the core we’ve higher needs”. Wild Beasts has created a work that uses this savage rawness to its utmost effect by courageously pairing it with progressive, luxurious “computer music”. The result is an impressively compact (40:55!), hugely replayable, tumultuous album.