Album Review: Punk Drunk And Trembling [EP] by Wild Beasts

The EP opens with the title track "Punk Drunk & Trembling" - a tune which fits well into their recent synth inflected sound whilst exploring themes central to many Wild Beasts songs. The narrator is 'trembling', 'terrified' but 'punk drunk'. It's similar to songs like "We Still Got the Taste Dancin' on Our Tongues" in its exploration of lust. "Last Night All My Dreams Came True" is a song which combines the best things about Wild Beasts.

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At the risk of sounding cynical, surely one of the most popular thoughts to run through the minds of Wild Beasts fans when news of their split broke last month was that the permanent implications of the word continue to be diminished year on year. We are, after all, now living in a post-Shut Up and Play the Hits world, what with LCD Soundsystem having announced their reconvention less than five years after they quite literally made a massive song and dance of the fact that they were finished, at Madison Square Garden. Any residual relief that idea might have offered, though, will surely have been offset by the realisation that Britain is losing precisely the kind of band that it can least afford to - an emotionally literate and musically adventurous indie rock outfit, one that has frequently and with considerable delicacy and intelligence confronted the subject of toxic masculinity.

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When Wild Beasts announced their split in September, many fans responded with a gnashing of teeth at the disappearance of such a fantastically improbable guitar group--tempered by a muted acceptance that their last album, Boy King, showed a band running out of gas. It wasn't so much that Boy King was a bad album. The problem was that for the first time since debuting in 2008, Wild Beasts sounded behind the times, offering up a cloying R&B fusion that wasn't nearly as good as, say, Arctic Monkeys' AM.

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