So confident was I that Smother would win the Mercury Prize, I [almost] put a bet on it to do so, before the nominations had been released. The money-saver in me will always be glad that I did not waste the £5 (they weren’t even nominated). However, the other, less economically scrupulous part of me will forever remain puzzled as to why this 42-minute masterstroke didn’t run away with the Prize. With or without the validation of the Barclaycard-sponsored music critics, the Kendal quartet’s third album is a stunning example of British pop music at its most ambitious and simultaneously subtle.
The benefit of doing a retrospective review is that you know exactly what the consensus on the work was. As it is, Wild Beasts were painted as a pretty saucy bunch in the wake of Smother. Reviews focused so much on the album’s apparent exploration of sex that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a concept album based on foreplay. The pleasures of the body are clearly at the forefront of the mind of the writers, as a listen to ‘Plaything’ or ‘Bed Of Nails’ proves. However, the overriding link between the songs is not touchy-feely indulgence, but repressed emotion, a theme that gives the album its distinction. A disturbing, stifled feeling simmers beneath the surface of each song, always threatening to appear, as it has done in their two previous albums. Be it in the vicious stabs of guitar at the end of ‘When I’m Sleepy’ from Two Dancers, or in the shrill falsetto that we know Hayden (or “the high voiced one off of The Wild Beasts”, as he would surely have become known by the tabloids had Smother won the Mercury Prize) displayed to great effect on Limbo, Panto.
The band restrain themselves, however, and you end up listening to the album over and over, always waiting for the feeling of release that is only partially satisfied by the climax of ‘End Comes Too Soon’. But by depriving the listener of deliverance, Wild Beasts ensure we are kept rapt. Thus all the songs swell hypnotically and addictively, an amalgamation of plaintive, ambient keyboards, meticulous, inspired percussion, and inventive, translucent guitar hooks, to synthesise a feeling of total immersion. The effect being that the album, ahem, surrounds you like a warm bath. But this is meant to be guitar music by a band from Leeds. Fuck the warm bath, shouldn’t it sound like a cold shower? No. Luckily for us, Wild Beasts have successfully burrowed their way out of a genre seemingly full of dead ends. They’re free to do whatever the want and, hey kids, isn’t that what rock ‘n’ roll is really all about?
The delights of Smother, therefore, never waver. Ceaselessly listenable, not only because of its lyrical accomplishment, but its unoppressive production, it’s an album that rewards in its very refusal to provide passing satisfaction.