About three minutes into Still Life Still’s 45-minute set at Seattle’s Chop Suey, I realized I wasn’t going to get through this review without mentioning Broken Social Scene. The young Torontonians would get high marks at Canadian Indie Rock College for their grasp of prevailing aesthetics and sonic concepts. Scruffy and half-bearded, their laid-back jams were charged with an energy meandering between raw and relaxed. Nothing particularly new there, but the band’s chemistry was effortless. They weren’t particularly tight, but they weren’t particularly tight in the exact same proportion to each other.
Wild Beasts, on the other, were extremely tight. And by time the English four-piece took the stage, the 250-capacity club was packed. On paper, Wild Beasts shouldn’t be perplexing: four guys playing two guitars, bas, and drums, pinning down grooves with brutal focus. Their metronome beats and precisely picked guitars compelled onlookers to consistent head-bobbing and concentrated ass-shaking.
But it was the vocal interplay that stole the show. Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming share lead vocals, and the contrast between their styles is transfixing. Fleming’s voice is deep and steady, while Thorpe’s vibrato-heavy falsetto is startling, even unnerving, cutting through the thick instrumentation. They only indulged in a few vocal harmonies, but their traded vocal duties were clearly the highlights of the show.
Yet, while Wild Beasts constantly threaten greatness in a live setting, they’re a little too static overall. After building solid grooves and cranking up the tension, a lot of the songs stop as soon as you expect them to climax or change up the beat. They never build on the momentum. Still, it was a captivating hour of music and proof that, in a world of electronic music-making gadgets, a traditional four-piece rock band can still sound fresh on stage.
