Wild Beasts at The Olympia Theatre | Review

Wild Beasts at The Olympia Theatre, Saturday 29th March 2014

They’re not the only ’80s revivalists currently synthing up the airwaves but something about Wild Beasts manages to transcend whatever negative connotations come along with that label. Coming off their latest album ‘Present Tense’ the lead single Wanderlust is something of a microcosm for the band; weirdly uneventful yet engaging, proudly unironic and defiantly decadent without ever being extravagant. They’re a band of contradictions, so much so that even that description is contradictory. Let’s move on.

Before the Kendalites take to the stage it is the Macbooked solo electronic stylings of East India Youth who is tasked with warming up the gathered multitude. These kinds of acts often come across like that guy who wanders into a house party and starts changing the songs on the iPod and for a minute it’s easy to get stuck in this prejudice. However Mr. Doyle – stiffly bopping to his own tunes like Kraftwerk injected with a shot of cocaine – doesn’t take too long to convince us that his diffuse sounds are worth checking out. A very nice opener.

Unperturbed. That’s another word we’ll throw out there in an attempt to describe Wild Beasts, who take to the stage in just such a manner and ease into their set with very little ceremony. And it’s not just one new track that opens the set, but two, with Sweet Spot coming in straight after Mecca. Then the appropriately titled Reach A Bit Further has them ceding a little bit to the fans before full out appeasing them with The Devil’s Crayon from their first album. Two tracks later they tear it up with A Simple Beautiful Truth, but they seemingly haven’t done anything different yet. The whole set is performed almost identically and it still manages to get better as it goes. How do they do it?

Let’s go back to their defiant decadence, as it’s their most prominent feature on the stage, and their latest album does open with the line “We’re decadent beyond our means”. Lead singer Hayden Thorpe shamelessly sips a glass of red wine throughout the set and kind of wispily vibes to the music rather than going full “Kraftwerk injected with a shot of cocaine” as he well could. Plus the band remain largely in darkness, backlit for most of the set, and only bringing out the lasers once the photographers have been shuffled out of the pit, which is just mean.

Moody white people music. That’s what it is. But at the same time it’s really good music and played well, and with style. It isn’t cynical or depressing or obnoxious, but it is moody, and it’s for white people. Even when Tom Fleming jives to the music he does it to the key and guitar playing rather than the drums, which is a particularly white person thing to do. This is the key to Wild Beasts’ appeal, because being moody and white is not cool, because what modern genocides or civil wars or general disenfranchisement have white people had to put up with lately? Embarrassingly little. But some people – your trusted reviewer included – are moody and white nonetheless. Don’t they too deserve a band who sings just for them?

Of course they do, that’s the whole point of music, and during the encore as the three other members of the band are knocking out some formless guitar and drum sounds Thorpe downs his glass of wine then stands in the centre of the stage in complete darkness and just watches us. As he turns you can see his silhouette is smiling and as the sounds grow louder and your spine is tingling under the heavy weight of the bass, he sways up to the microphone and they burst out the latter part of the again appropriately titled End Comes Too Soon. Against all the odds, Wild Beasts are…something.