In an effort to communicate my growing obsession with Leeds' band Wild Beasts I was going to post the video for "All the Kings Men," their most recent single. But as great as they are, neither that song nor "Hooting and Howling," the first single off their latest album Two Dancers, quite capture the astonishment of lead singer Hayden Thorpe's voice, the insanely sexy and joyful way it swings from a Freddie Mercury falsetto to a Thom Yorke scrape. His wild vocal transitions--he'll often do them between the syllables of a single word--are as peculiarly satisfying to me as scratching a mosquito bite or having a gaz. When Thorpe's voice is counterpointed with bassist Tom Fleming's more conventionally masculine singing style, the interplay of vocal hotness is so overwhelming it makes me feel like a faggy pinball.
"Assembly" (from their first album Limbo, Panto) has a queeny cabaret vibe that's atypical for them but is a lot of fun, and the lyrics are a blast of ecstatic megalomania--"My top's off - I'm a goose pimpled god! Upon my girth rests the earth, gonna give it what I've got!"--that nicely represents the band's unabashed joy at making music.
I also posted this video and not something newer or more typical because Thorpe looks hotter with the short hair and hipster stache he rocks here than he does long-haired and shaved, and my girlish, cream-myself-every-time-I-listen-to-it obsession with Thorpe's voice is the main reason I'm writing about the band in the first place.
KOMMENTEN!