Wild Beasts

The four-piece from the uber-romantic Lake District in the English Midlands borrowed their name from the fauvist movement in art; in French “les fauves” means wild animals. Hayden Thorpe’s crooning falsetto vocal, reminiscent of both Antony and Bronski Beat, not only makes the beasts shy, it also irritates the sexes. Moreover, on their most recent album, “Two Dancers”, the beasts not only reference the proletarian tradition of Vaudeville-style British music halls, but also flirt with the class struggle. On it you find such wonderful lines as “Us kids are cold and cagey rattling around the town/ Scaring the oldies into their dressing gowns/ As the dribbling dogs howl”. “Erotic downbeat music” is how the band describe their own style, which, not un-ironically, puts the glam of their disco-wave in a nutshell.