Smother

Wild Beasts have remained an act with no intention of blending in. Smother, their third full-length, is just as the above quote promises: completely uncompromising. And that's why it succeeds.

After you let it seep its way into your daily life, Smother reveals itself as the type of masterwork so fragile and unobtrusive as to leave itself vulnerable to being brushed away by those listeners without patience. Don't let yourself be among them.

It is not only Wild Beats' finest album to date, but one of the best you're likely to hear all year. [Jun 2011, p.90]

Smother sees this singular and intriguing group still on the ascendant--limiting notions of normal music notwithstanding. [Jun 2011, p.92]

In every way, it's alive, but mostly, it's alive with possibility. [Jun 2011, p.112]

Smother is deeply sad and lonely, but still a barbed invitation to intimacy; like Coleridge's albatross, an extraordinarily elegant, stunning, (near)-perfect portrait of how terribly bad decisions can turn out.

While it stands apart, this is an evolution that will please both Wild Beasts' early adopters and the many converts that will surely follow from what is, without doubt, one of the stand out releases of the year.

As Wild Beasts records tend to go, Smother is par for the course in terms of its opulent eccentricities and its magnificently polished arrangements. This time around, though, the Beasts have been tamed. Frankly, that's a disappointment.

Smother isn't conventional chart material, but will make their burgeoning cult impossible to ignore.

It'd be reductive to try and describe a timeless album like Smother as a step up from its two predecessors, or even as a surefire Mercury contender--although it is, on both counts.

Surprisingly hot to the touch, Wild Beasts' third album does more with less, paring down the quartet's groove-inflected chamber pop to expose raw burning desire.

The ultimate beauty of Smother, though, comes from its subtlety as Wild Beasts continue to transcend conventional pop music with yet another great addition to their catalog.

Smother does exactly what it suggests but with a poetic fragility and an exacting panache that enthrals and entices like never before. An essential album.

Overall, Smother seems to be missing purpose. I hear those careful ruminations on relationships, and I hear the pain that evidently went into this, but it leaves me cold.

Smother is an exercise in moderation, trying to find the precise balance between audacious beauty and emotional intelligence. The depraved encounters it presents are brash, risky, and just like its characters, always on the verge of imploding.

Overall, Smother finds Wild Beasts hurdling that difficult third album with some aplomb.

Maybe it's because we've come to expect these guys to knock us out with each album, but Smother can't help but feel like a misstep.

In songs suffused with need and vulnerability, the music leaves itself open, waiting to be approached.

Smother, roiling in passion often disorienting in its envelopment, is difficult to penetrate, but there is ecstasy in the succumbing.

They are, right now, the most inspirational, intriguing, effortlessly enrapturing band at work on these shores. And Smother might well prove to be the album of 2011.

Wild Beasts' Hayden Thorpe emotes like the forsaken son of Elbow's Guy Garvey and Antony. Thankfully, over the course of Smother, the English quartet proves they have the muscle to back up their lead singer's melodramatic warble.

Poised as hyper-indulgent fellas, Smother is a startlingly controlled album, one that's exactly as smooth and smoldering as its moniker posits.

Smother may lack the proper drive of Two Dancers, but it succeeds in whittling down what has become Wild Beasts' motif.

Overall, Smother is brilliant, and a record by a band with a big brain, a generous heart, hungry ears and a permanent erection.

Although Smother isn't as suffocating as perhaps it should be, it's still an interesting venture for Wild Beasts to have taken and definitely, a worthy follow-up to Two Dancers. And so while there isn't anything as wildly inventive as maybe "Hooting & Howling" anywhere to be found, there is a great deal of lingering new sounds to get lost in.

It's hard to argue with the result anyway: Its slow build and aching vocals stand out as a purposeful moment of perfection on a record chock full of them.