“Do I dare to disturb the Universe?” ponders Hayden Thorpe in the chorus of Wild Beasts’ ‘He the Colossus’, borrowing a line from T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. In his poem, Eliot gave us a portrait of the character Prufrock, meant to represent man in the age of modernity. The collapse of religion, a world wrecked by war and the increasing urbanisation and industrialisation of modern life condensed into a single individual. With all the alienation and inability to act that came with it. On Boy King, Wild Beasts are similarly creating a portrait that is an aggregate of contemporary – although almost exclusively male – existence. One where the media exploits our base desires and all aspects of our life are surveyed. The line between public and private lives becoming totally erased. Masculinity, as always, is a primary concern of Wild Beasts’ music and Boy King is an unflinching look at male identity from multiple angles and perspectives.

Wild Beasts might sometimes paint sex as deeply neurotic, impossible to extract from its social-political dimensions. But they still have unflinching faith in music’s aphrodisiacal potential. When combined with keen precision, rhythmic syncopation, the breathy timbre of the voice and slick, streamlined production that pulls from R’n’B and funk, it can be the ideal medium to convey all consuming desire.

Thorpe’s falsetto voice is as impishly transgressive as ever. Filtering musings on maleness through a prism that purposefully subverts any normative assumptions of gender. It complicates what might have been a crude or lewd version of male sexuality and creates one that is complex and multi-faceted. It is aggressive and passive, boastful but neurotic. “I like it messy / don’t you make it neat / Your heart I’ll eat”, repeating the word “eat” while sucking air through his teeth in ecstatic lust during ‘Eat your Heart out Adonis’.

‘Get My Bang’ continues Wild Beasts’ penchant for songs that explore their specific brand of randyness. Copulating aggressive sexuality with fervent consumerism inside a raw, barebones funk rhythm.

The flexing and muscular riff of ‘Tough Guy’ sends the testosterone levels through the roof. Like watching a line of posturing body builders. But it also takes to task the stoic and emotionally repressed version of male identity and reveals it as useless for coping with the contemporary world. “You know the route well / so you follow the old path / To a new hell”. While ‘Alpha Female’ proposes a roll reversal of gender roles where the man becomes subservient to the woman: “Alpha Female, I’ll be right behind you”.

Since Two Dancers, Wild Beasts have been increasingly immersed in the sounds of electronic music. Noticeably producers such as Oneohtrix Point Never, whose hyperactive synth-work captures something of the dizzying plurality of modern existence. It can be heard in the synthetic, sighing noises that open ‘Big Cat’ and the percussively used pitched voices in ‘Ponytail’. These sounds obscure the line between the organic and the synthetic. It’s something Wild Beasts openly pine to project with their music. But being a collection of musicians playing together restricts them from fully utilising the unlimited potential of laptop production. Their music retains a restrained and arch feeling to it that is characteristic of post-punk. Leaving plenty of space in its Spartan production. It might feel thematically in opposition to what they hope to achieve but it doesn’t do anything to detract it from being a compelling listen from beginning to end. While the synth parts on Present Tense sometimes felt cinematic and cold, here they constantly groove, slavishly following and obeying the rhythm. Boy King is unabashedly huge and brash pop. Bringing together the more guitar centric grooves of their early sound and the more futurist electronica of recent efforts. It’s also not afraid to get down and roll around in the muck, using plenty of gritty distortion and fuzzed up effects to replace the more delicate sensibility the band is associated with.

‘2BU’ is one of the album’s highlights. Drawing on genres such as dancehall and UK funky with its deep rolling, broken-beat rhythm, rumbling sub-frequencies and stuttering, skipping rim shots. Tom Flemming delivering a creepy line such as, “I want your face / I want your skin” in a seductive, mournful baritone. The somewhat cryptic lyrics again see the band talking about half a dozen things at once – possession, greed, jealously and love – and exposing them as one and the same. “I’m in your head/I’m in your dreams” he tells us somewhat threateningly. Dreaming is a motif that comes up time and time again in Boy King, including the album’s closer ‘Dreamliner’. They reflect our desires in a way we are rarely able to express in waking life.

The gentle melancholic chords of ‘Dreamliner’ shows the fundamental concern that links Prufrock from the beginning of the last century to the Boy King in the early decades of this one. That is a desire to be fully understood. Subjectivity is a barrier preventing us from ever being fully known to each other. The image we are given of the Boy King is a plural one. He is often contradictory and never comprehendible in totality. A Nietzchean figure, able to will himself to power, but also a slave to his own base needs. “What I’m dreaming of, you’ll never know.”
Louis Ormesher
 

Website: wild-beasts.co.uk
Facebook: facebook.com/wildbeasts
Twitter: twitter.com/WildBeasts

Read our Spotlight feature on Wild Beasts here: http://brightonsfinest.com/html/index.php/spotlight/1632-wild-beasts