Wild Beasts - Live at the O2 Academy Brixton

Given the hugely positive reception for Wild Beasts' fourth album, Present Tense, the bar was set high for the level of last Tuesday's performance. Present Tense made it onto NME's list of the best albums of 2014 so far, and it's been highly praised by all who've heard it. It's just praise indeed, but it takes a while to warm up to Present Tense, just because it's such a big step away from 2011's Smother. Anyone who claims to be a Wild Beasts aficionado (and there aren't many, but those who do are truly dedicated) will tell you that the shift isn't obvious, but more of a subtle move away from the insistent and yet artistic vulgarity of songs like Plaything. It's intelligent without being inaccessible; there are songs about sex that are less about fulfilling an animal desire and more about fulfilling an emotional deficit. In short, Wild Beasts have grown up. They'd probably resent that description quite a lot.

Psychedelic light show

With East India Youth supporting, and with the O2 Academy Brixton as the host for the festivities, it looks set to be an evening of intelligent music and heavy bass. For a one-man band, East India Youth's William Doyle is surprisingly captivating and bad-dance-moves inducing. Everything is achieved with his MacBook and a synth, all wired-up to amplify the noise by a billion. His sufficiently awkward refusal to make eye contact or interact with the audience made his absorbed and passionate performance even more interesting. A "hello" would've been nice, though.

When Wild Beasts come on, it's clear that all their hard graft to achieve some sort of notoriety has paid off; the screams are incessant throughout their set. They kick off with the beautiful Mecca, from their new album, which starts off in a languidly passionate way, giving them plenty of scope for the rest of the evening.

Some bands, when they've just released a new album, prefer to play that album from start to finish, maybe giving the audience a cover, or the staple old song that gets wheeled out at every gig they do. Not so with Wild Beasts. They gave a nod to their past by putting songs like the wonderfully vibrant Devil's Crayon, from their first album, next to Daughters, a slightly disturbingly gorgeous song from their fourth. Far from being a bit strange, the contrast only demonstrates how far the band has comes from the Limbo, Panto days.

What makes Wild Beasts stand out from many other bands is that they in fact have two lead singers: Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming. Both men have distinctly different voices; Thorpe favours a higher range, tending more to use a falsetto, whereas Fleming's voice is gorgeously rich and smooth. It's the vocal equivalent of a chocolate fondue. In their live performances, it's fascinating to see how shared vocals work in practice. With songs like All The King's Men, Thorpe leaves Fleming to do his thing, but in Reach A Bit Further, the two voices mix and complement each other perfectly. On the album, it's wonderful. Live, it's phenomenally phantasmagorical. Alliteration intended.

Wild Beasts

The band members themselves clearly adore what they do. Their performance is full of enthusiastic headbanging, arm-moving, piano-bashing, and, in Thorpe's case, a new method of wide-legged dancing whilst playing the bass. These guys ain't nothing if not inventive.

Wanderlust, the leading track from the new album, isn't revealed until the encore, but it gets everyone screaming "don't confuse me with someone who gives a fuck" with visible glee. The night ends on the epic End Come Too Soon, sending the crowd into hysterics when everything dies down in the middle. It provides the perfect farewell to what really couldn't have been a better performance.

All that show did was prove to me how undeserving Wild Beasts are of being called "pop". It's far too small a bracket for the wide-ranging styles and lyrics that they encompass across their four albums. Their songs are too good to be overexposed with too much airplay. Their albums deserve to be picked up and discovered quietly, and then listened to with awe and wonder. Reader, I call upon ye to love Wild Beasts, and aid me in my quest to love them quietly. I find that too much screaming and shouting only drowns out the music.