![]() Maybe a voice that bizarre needs something pretty to curl up on, but each song, whether a ballad or a romper (mostly the latter), generates enough turbulence to float with pockmarked elegance. Shemika Campbell hails from a long line of limbo. This may be Wild Beasts' first album, but they've got a fully developed aesthetic, one that is thematically and vocally alien, but sonically, pop and conventional. Underneath these filmy and seductive layers is not a band in limbo. It's also Thorpe's most impressive vocal performance. The band sound more aggressive on the re-recorded LP version: the beat more danceable, the title line shakier and more seductive. "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants", originally recorded in 2006, still shows this. And others, like "Woebegone Wanderers", take on melodramatic halts and cabaret flourishes that render its subject matter comical. True, lots of the tracks on Limbo, Panto use minor chords to enhance the casual depravity of its characters, but nearly all the guitars chime and sparkle. The funny thing is that Wild Beasts pull it all off with grinning, chirping enjoyment. The Sunset Rubdown-like full-bodied pomp of "The Club of Fathomless Love" also runs down a series of rhetorical questions: "I've sheened.have I not?/ I've Brylcreemed, have I not?/ I've length of loinly manliness, have I not?" That speech oddity would sound appropriate in a camp, old-timey staging of Hamlet. Amin (born Adam Amin Daniel), the fantastically popular Portland, Oregon-based rapper, who rose to fame with his 2016 song, Caroline, remembers listening to music in the car on the way. Limbo, Panto is essentially a morality play as cabaret show as rollicking indie rock record. ![]() By Limbo, Panto's end he's cursed Aristotle, gone for "casual sex with a hard up thug," and sworn on his "own cock and balls." If there's a central character across these tracks, it's vice itself. "Men to be men, must love and pity," Thorpe announces on opener "Vigil For a Fuddy Duddy". ![]() Vocally, Thorpe plays with what idealized masculinity sounds like lyrically, the band wants to know what masculinity feels like. That indeterminate quality is the central theme of Limbo, Panto.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |