Wild Beasts’ Present Tense is a dramatically new album. Gleaming and sparkling with 1980s and 1990s electronic sound rethought and retooled with exquisite detail for the 21st century. It doesn’t sound like any boys-with-guitars band you’ve ever heard. And despite the coherence of its sweeping song structures, it wasn’t written so much as constructed from the ground up from tiny phrases and fragments, then it was layered together in the studio by Wild Beasts with co-producers Lexxx and Brian Eno protege Leo Abrahams. “We spent ages programming and piecing individual parts together,” says the band’s drummer Chris Talbot, “it was built on computers rather than played first, and we had the feeling that anyone in the band could do anything without feeling they had one role to stick to.” Even using this cut and paste recording style the band somehow retains all of the coherence that can only come from years playing together in basements and on stages. Wild Beasts have created their own world which the listener has no choice but to enter and immerse themselves in.
Wild Beasts are more of a band than most bands. They’ve spent their career thus far deconstructing exactly what it is to be a band, trying to escape the constraints of what is expected from four lads playing together – and more so than ever on the deliberately synthetic, instrument-swapping Present Tense. But here they are, four albums down and more than eight years since they first played together in this lineup, still feeling like a gang, still feeling like a band as it is supposed to be, with a single clear vision and sound. Just a few minutes in a room together with them, seeing how their four distinct personalities play off one another, and it’s obvious.
Album includes a digital download.
