Wild Beasts, Brixton Academy

Wild Beasts are a band that like to sing, in flamboyant falsetto, about cock ‘n’ balls and arse-slaps, tits and cowardice. Their lyrics are filthy, almost offensively so, but the four-piece can be seductive when they want to be. 

The first thing you’ll hear at their April 1 gig at Brixton Academy is the satiny pulse of the synth, the easy trill of the guitar. That’s how they get you, these boys from the Lake District. They hook you with their ear candy and then they reel you in with their lyrics, which are simultaneously sinister and tender. “In detail you are even more beautiful than from afar,” Hayden Thorpe sings on Palace. “I could learn you like the blinded would do, feeling their way in the dark.” Thorpe’s counter-tenor can sound operatic, almost camp; that it is able to convey menace even while revelling in someone’s beauty is a testament to its subtlety.

With his bass guitar and vocals, Tom Fleming anchors Thorpe and his soaring notes. Fleming’s deep range lends gravitas to their latest album, the strikingly polished Present Tense (It’s an unusually contained record for the group. Nonetheless, Wild Beasts still know how to have fun—check out their hammy rendition of Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball. But where they once gloried in cheese ‘n’chips ‘n’ sexual effluvia, they now speak of love as A Simple Beautiful Truth, of sexual congress as a kind of Mecca. Wild Beasts might be growing up, but they’re nowhere close to being tamed.