Hayden Thorpe sneers "Don't confuse with me someone who gives a fuck" on the first track of Present Tense, as if Wild Beasts could ever be the victims of mistaken identity. The inimitable interplay between Thorpe’s keening alto and Tom Fleming’s rich lower registers, the sleek and supple rhythm section, the immaculate production that provides quiet storm R&B’s high-thread count and funk’s pinpoint precision: you can’t really approach this sound without ripping them off outright, so no one even tries. Much has been made about how Wild Beasts have drastically reduced the musical drama since their swashbuckling, chandelier-swinging debut Limbo, Panto. Present Tense doesn’t reverse that trend, but without much left to discard sonically, Wild Beasts make their most radical and daring subtraction: emotional drama.
As unique as they’ve been musically, Wild Beasts' candid carnality has made them far more rare in the boy’s club of rock music than you’d been led to believe. Uncoupling masculinity from cartoon machismo, indie slackerdom, teenage neediness, and brooding distance, Wild Beasts presented modern man as a libidinous creature burdened by expectations and failed by his body, both hunter-aggressor and prey to their own insecurities and embarrassments. Thorpe sang “I know I'm not any kind of heart-throb/ But at the same time, I'm not any sort of slob” on Smother’s “Plaything” and that was about the size of it.
Things are a lot healthier on Present Tense, and Wild Beasts' dueling vocalists own up to past mistakes. Thorpe sums it up on “Past Perfect”: “Man did fuck up/ And then he learnt.” Lurid and obscenely limber, “Mecca” presents sexual compatibility as nothing short of god’s will and eternal truth. The same goes for the “Sweet Spot”, its title signifying “A godly state/ Where the real and the dream may consummate.” You’ve got the gist of it by the time “A Simple Beautiful Truth” comes around, and it’s Wild Beasts’ most locked-in, fluid performance, barely two minutes of gorgeous and curvaceous R&B. These add ballast to the plainspoken and plainly pretty pop songs that define Wild Beasts’ new romantic fulfillment. “Palace” and “Pregnant Pause” come awfully close to treacle outside of context, but balanced by the loinclothed swagger of “Nature Boy” and the apocalyptic retribution that “Daughters” foretells, contentment feels earned rather than seen as entitlement.
Still, Present Tense is incrementally more dense and foreboding than Smother or Two Dancers. This is largely due to the implementation of synthesizers, arranged by Leo Abrahams (amongst other things, co-writer of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s “Strange Overtones”) and Lexxx, whose previous, blunt-force stadium-status charges (Arcade Fire, the Killers, Madonna and Keane amongst them) are about the exact opposite of Wild Beasts. And yet, even with all of this expert musicianship and hired talent, the added sounds are soft and welcoming. The lo-fi, rigid beats of “Wanderlust” and “Daughters” and the Hounds of Love-style Linn rolls that ramp up the chorus of “Mecca” push against Chris Talbot, a drummer who’s never played a standard rock beat and still hasn’t; he’s at his most emotive on Present Tense, as “Nature Boy” skulks with primitive menace, while the sadness of “A Dog’s Life” is conveyed by an inventive trick that makes his kit sound like it’s deflating.
Though dealt with indirectly, class struggle has always pervaded Wild Beasts' lyrics and they’ve always empathized with the outsider for good reason. They came on the scene at a time when the Arctic Monkeys ensured that lad-rock would continue to constitute the UK’s musical ruling class, and so their early, theatrical scene-chewing was seen as the epitome of drama club elitism. And while they’ve relocated from northern farming town Kendal to London and occupy their own sweet spot between the top of the pops and the basement, Wild Beasts still side with the have-nots without condescending. “Nature Boy” plays off a common artistic trope—here’s a wild man that will do things to your woman that your white-collar, Victorian ass can’t even imagine and she’s really into it. That sort of thing is right within Fleming’s wheelhouse, but that dynamic seems a little too simplistic for Wild Beasts. You might miss the money quote courtesy of Jake “The Snake” Roberts (“A little fun for me/ And none for you”), but the title is indeed a Ric Flair reference, and so the and so the caricatured imagery of “Nature Boy” makes the song as a whole a laugh at how complexities of class, masculinity, and sex can often be reduced to the heel/babyface duality of pro wrestling.
A similar skewering occurs on “Wanderlust”, which thankfully doesn’t aspire to be another pat, “Common People”-style rant about the rich kids fetishizing artistic “authenticity.” Instead, Thorpe questions the reductionism that goes on in both sides and the self-obsession that goes into any artistic pursuit. "In the mother tongue/ What's the verb 'to suck?'", Thorpe taunts, a subliminal at some fellow UK band getting a little too obvious in their Americanization. It also makes you wonder if “Nature Boy” might be a metaphor for how Wild Beasts compare to some of their more accommodating and popular peers. So what is “Wanderlust” doing as the opener on a record that focuses so much on domestic satisfaction? Get to the closer “Palace” and Thorpe bookends it by singing, “Baby there’s have alls and there are have nots/ I’m happy with what I got”. Both songs speak on the futility of trying to attain any sort of real happiness trying to be someone else. Lucky for us, there’s no one else like them and on Present Tense, their success has allowed Wild Beasts to be even more like themselves.
