There was nothing particularly odd about Wild Beasts frontman Hayden Thorpe coming onstage wearing a tiny red beanie. It really didn't look that out of place. Nevertheless, nearly every concert has a guy in the audience who feels compelled to comment on any eccentricity present in the performance.
"Nice hat," that guy shouted sarcastically from under a balcony at the rear of the Paradise Rock Club in Boston.
Thorpe, unfazed — or too naive to realize the facetiousness behind the comment — quickly and humbly said, "Thanks."
It was at that moment — not the hours spent listening to the band's albums at home, nor later that night during the actual performance — that I truly fell in love with this band from Kendal, England.
I arrived at the venue on Tuesday night right as the opener, the ambient pop collective Bobby, began its set. The material was enough of a departure from their headliner that it didn't seem like a copycat act, yet close enough that they had the audience ensnared for the duration of their time.
At 9:52, Wild Beasts came onstage to impassioned applause, considering how many people were there — the place was only slightly over half−capacity.
I honestly didn't know what to expect from the show. An uninitiated listener could very easily dismiss Wild Beasts' sound as grandiloquent, but I held out hope that the sensuality that pervades each song would translate well live. It did.
After a grateful (but rushed)salutation, the room flooded with the droning bass line of "Lion's Share," the opening track from the band's brilliantly paced and most recent album, "Smother" (2011). Thorpe's vocals here — and for the rest of the night — were spot−on. His bass and vocal counterpart, Tom Fleming, sounded equally breathtaking.
Maybe it's the lack of reverb in their music, but there's a certain staleness, albeit minute, to many of the vocal tracks on the studio recordings of Wild Beasts' albums. On Tuesday, that wasn't the case at all. The dual crooning between the two singers remained powerful and resounding throughout the night.
Chris Talbot's remarkable finesse on the drums, while understated and largely unacknowledged throughout the show, was worth notice. I consider Talbot to be one of today's most underrated drummers; his arrangements aren't exceptionally dense or virtuosic, but he makes outstanding use of auxiliary percussion and tom drums.
Predictably, the songs that got the crowd moving the most came mostly from the band's sophomore effort, "Two Dancers"(2009), the funkiest of its three albums. "This is Our Lot," "Hooting and Howling" and "All the King's Men" were performed with expert precision and got the audience in a dancing mood.
The concert's one sour note was Thorpe's lack of enunciation on "The Fun Powder Plot," a song that owes its fun factor to its lyrics. Luckily, the high point of the night smoothed over that disappointment; the set closer, "End Come Too Soon," was a sonically simple and beautiful jam that featured a heavy and sustained ambient bass. That aside, it's hard to pinpoint any genuine highlights of the show — there was an intense and mutual appreciation shared between band and audience that made every song a satisfying exchange.
In an interview with British online music source "The Quietus," Thorpe said, "It's about saying, are you going to come in and listen or not? Because if you're not, we're not going to accommodate you, to let you be part of and involved in this intimacy." Though the line may come off as bombastic, it's actually a warm sentiment directed at the band's existing fans. At the Paradise last Tuesday, members of the crowd were united by their love for a band that has terrifically matured with each album and tour they've pumped out.
