One concession to the Halloweekend: Wild Beasts hoot and howl

Other than that stupendous Dead Man’s Bones track I posted at the dawning of this month, I’ve mostly avoided soundtracking the spooky season. But after a day watching students attired in sheets and sparkles and feathers, and as I now prepare to assemble my own costume for tonight (#1 of 2 for the weekend), I am suddenly in a Halloweeny mood. This Wild Beasts remix is the most perfect thing I’ve heard for all your festivities, to get your Halloween party hopping –and possibly hooting and howling– this weekend:

Hooting and Howling (Leo Zero Remix) – Wild Beasts

In related news, Skip Matheny of the band Roman Candle (quickly becoming one of my favorite new-to-me bands of this year) recently interviewed Wild Beasts for American Songwriter Magazine, in a debut feature called “Drinks With.” Skip used to be a bartender in a retirement home (rad), and sits down to drink and discuss music with this British 4-piece in the basement of the Mercury Lounge, before they played a show together.

I thought it was a shining example of what can happen when musicians get to talk music, instead of us commoners who know not what we speak of. Skip had great questions, like:

When you are writing, do you all think in terms of pop songs or craft? For example the repeated line from your song “All the King’s Men,” “Let me show my darling what that means” works in a similar way to an old ballad, or to the repeated line in a song like “The Gallery” by Joni Mitchell. By the last time you hear the repeated phrase, it’s incredibly different and twisted from the first time you heard it.

HT: I think the beauty of pop is that it’s forgiving of everything. You can throw anything into it, and it’s still pop. You can throw in some sort of Japanese folk music with ghetto hip-hop, and it is pop. Also, it is a really underestimated skill: taking big ideas and condensing them down into simple lines. Some people have just got it. I think we’ve gotten better at it.

All The Kings Men (live on Daytrotter) – Wild Beasts

Also, in that Daytrotter session write-up, Sean Moeller muses how “Hayden Thorpe sounds like David Bowie, out there making mini operas, the kinds of which no one has ever attempted before. He does this with sweeping textures and resplendent coloring, making us feel as if we’ve never seen this hue they call red before and this yellow is something dream-like and without a properly programmed definition.”

Yes.