From the beginning, Wild Beasts’ music has been a story of two voices. At the forefront was Hayden Thorpe, with a falsetto that sounded like a punchline, swerving between low, horny grunts and operatic trills. In 2009, when he described a scene “equally elegant and ugly” in a song called “Hooting and Howling,” it was easy to hear it as winking self-diagnosis. Thorpe’s foil was Tom Fleming, the band’s second vocalist, whose earnest, fluttering baritone felt like a comedown from Thorpe’s high drama. If an animated movie were to be made out of Wild Beasts’ songs, it might involve a mischievous hyena and a bear cub teaming up to escape from depraved, Dickensian Britain.
As the band evolved, they learned more tricks. Their rhythm section, originally comprising Fleming and drummer Chris Talbot, became one of the strongest in indie rock. Songs like “Wanderlust” and “All the King’s Men” strut and gallop, turn sexy and menacing, find weird grooves and never sit still. And once they outgrew their theater-kid antics, Wild Beasts refined their sound with a synthy, sophisticated grace that seemed to come second nature to them. No group has evolved from Franz Ferdinand comparisons to Spirit of Eden so seamlessly.
Their last album, 2016’s Boy King, was supposed to be a triumph merging the youthful libido of their first records and the ambient pop of their latter ones, but it fell flat. For the first time, their ideas felt more interesting than their music. Last Night All My Dreams Came True is a live-in-the-studio collection that’s designed to be their closing statement after they announced their breakup last fall. Disappointingly, the tracklist skews heavily toward Boy King and offers an unflattering survey of their work. Listening to it, you could mistake Wild Beasts for a decent band with a couple of extraordinary songs, as opposed to an extraordinary band with one sub-par album.
It’s not uncommon for artists to revisit their lesser work, and trading the studio for a semi-live context is a good instinct. But the problem with Boy King was not John Congleton’s slick production (at its best, it sounded like Oneohtrix Point Never scoring Fifty Shades of Grey). The problem was the songs, and, without an audience to receive them, these renditions only highlight their flaws. “2BU” still feels underwritten, with Fleming addressing toxic masculinity through cliche (“I’m the type of man who wants to watch the world burn”) and cheap cop-outs (“You know that I’m the worst!”). The album’s lead single, “Get My Bang,” sung by Thorpe, unfortunately still resembles the Lonely Island featuring Wild Beasts.
The songs that fare best are the ones they’ve road-tested for years. Tracks from Two Dancers—the 2009 album that served as their pivot point—remain brilliantly romantic and grotesque, suggesting that maybe the conceit of Boy King was something they’d already accomplished. Their masterpiece, 2011’s Smother, is sadly underrepresented (“End Come Too Soon” would have been appropriate), as is 2014’s Present Tense. That album provides some surprising highlights, like when Thorpe weaves a few lyrics from “Palace” into “The Devil’s Crayon,” one of Fleming’s first great songs, from their debut.
Both Present Tense and this set open with “Wanderlust,” the dazzling fight song that calls out the legions of British acts who emerged around Wild Beasts and swiftly lost their identity. In this performance, a role reversal is at play within the band, as Thorpe breathes his lyrics in a delicate sigh and Fleming attacks the harmony with explosive intensity. Both that song and “The Devil’s Palace” suggest a collection that could change how Wild Beasts operate, a promise that the rest of the set retreats from. While it might not be a satisfying goodbye, Last Night All My Dreams Came True is—like all of Wild Beasts’ albums—an artfully rendered snapshot of a band always in motion.
