Live music review: Wild Beasts
Wild Beasts are unlikely pop stars. Their Mercury-nominated 2010 album, Two Dancers, was an unsettling meditation on male sexuality and British regional identity; this year’s Present Tense blended glacial synths and fever-dream lyrics (it is a cliché to say that a piece of art is influenced by David Lynch — in this case, it might actually be true).
For all the woozy dissonance, the Lake District quartet has basked in commercial and critical success. Playing their first proper Irish headline show in five years, they have come close to selling out the Olympia and even their unconventional tunes — of which they have plenty — are greeted as though they were the last word in crowd-pleasing anthemia. The boozy atmosphere is starkly at odds with their set and yet feels curiously appropriate, giving the music a new context.
