Roger's Year in Music 2014, No. 9: Present Tense, by Wild Beasts.

"Don't confuse me for someone who gives a fuck" ranks with "hope I die before I get old." There comes a time when a simple statement is enough: This band is utterly unique. NME's Ben Hewitt elaborates:

Wild Beasts have always been fantasists: four young men from Kendal who, finding the humdrum world around them wanting, escaped through the back of their wardrobes to explore other universes. Their 2008 debut ‘Limbo, Panto’ invented its own playground of archaic, dandyish guitar-pop. 2009’s ‘Two Dancers’ upped the ante with its paeans to caddish courting and knee-tremblers down back alleys. And 2011’s ‘Smother’ saw them replaying memory tapes of lost loves, endlessly self-flagellating and cut off from reality.

Kendal is "The Auld Grey Town," located in Cumbria (northwestern England).

It looks like a nice place to visit and enjoy a pint or three, although perhaps a bit stifling for musicians with an exceedingly singular vision.

"In your mother tongue, what's the verb 'to suck'?"

Truth be told, I enjoy listening both to Wild Beasts and Arctic Monkeys, and the issue of accents (not to mention internecine quarrels) may or may not be significant. However, I'm struck by Hayden Thorpe's wisdom in the quote below. Influences are to be expected, but whether making music, brewing beer or revitalizing a neglected urban core, isn't it all about our own mystical landscape?

Wild Beasts take swipe at British bands who sing with US accents; Hayden Thorpe claims lyrics to new single refer to UK singers with Americanised voices – such as the Arctic Monkeys, Sean Michaels (Guardian)

 ... "People are absorbing the mysticism of American artists, and rightfully so," Thorpe went on. "But we're interested in the mysticism of our own landscape and trying to reflect that rather than creating one that doesn't belong to us. That's where the most interesting, intriguing music comes from. The Smiths were incredibly exotic because they mysticised the landscape they grew up in, and it's beautiful how there are people who take pilgrimages to the Salford Lads Club. Equally, I'm obsessed and drawn to Bruce Springsteen's New Jersey, but it has nothing to do with my life."