Limbo, Panto

Sally forth of a Saturday evening into any one of Britain’s murderous provincial town squares; the smell of testosterone mingles with sweating lamb’s flesh while punters duck into dive after dive as refugees pleading for sanctuary. What do you see? A zoo? Wild Beasts see a ballet.

In Limbo, Panto this remarkable Leeds-via-Kendal four piece present a kind of Songs Of Innocence And Experience for the juvenile male psyche; cataloguing its obsessions, its foibles and its transferred desires with a satirist’s eye for the absurd and an artist’s eye for the absurdly beautiful.

With lofty intent, then, the end justifies the frequently bewildering means: musically-speaking, Wild Beasts peddle an indecent but skilfully realised mix of village fete tomfoolery, Orange Juice’s subtle melodicism and, in frontman Hayden Thorpe’s divisive falsetto aneurisms, a diva croon to rival the oddball likes of Russell Mael and Billy McKenzie.

With tracks like early calling-card ‘Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants’, ‘The Club Of Fathomless Love’ (“full with fierce, fathomless love / I spit and have spats to be rough”) Wild Beasts drink deep of the youthful elixir and dole out drubbings to the faces of their forefathers, only to find themselves undone in ways that have plagued mankind since time immemorial. Or not, as the case may be: ‘Cheerio Chaps’ is a grief-stricken music hall number examining what being shot out of a circus cannon will do for your wounded sense of male pride (“I gloat with gritted grin / to cheat my chin into keeping the womanly wibbling in”).