Make The Most Of Modernity

Wild Beasts “Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants” – Artistic originality is most often the result of a compelling individual attempting to mimic something beyond their capabilities, and so I can only wonder what stew of influences yielded the singing style of Wild Beasts’ Hayden Norman Thorpe. You can suss out some similarities to other vocalists, but there are no solid leads — everything you can find in his voice is fractured and warped, and may be a mutated version of some other thing. In the chorus of the single “Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants,” he’s shifting between a faux-operatic falsetto and a cartoonish growl, and sliding from feminine to masculine extremes in the space of a few nonsensical words whilst also conveying some kind of inexplicable thrill. He sounds by turns overwhelmed and overwhelming, and it’s somehow one of the most romantic things I’ve heard all year. The arrangement of the music is just as strange and joyous as its vocal, tweaking familiar sounds and structural conventions from rock and soul into something that is immediately engaging and vaguely alien. (Click here to buy it from HMV UK.)

Elsewhere:

Fluxblog comment box mainstay Pageblank writes a bit about Girls Aloud and feminism and J. Edward Keyes recaps the single worst episode of the Gilmore Girls to date.