It’s the morning after Wild Beasts played in Brighton and I’ve just put their 2011 album, Smother, on the stereo.

I might as well be back at the Concorde 2.

Note for note, this sounds exactly the same. To complain about a band playing their songs so that they sound like their songs might seem strange but I wasn’t the only person thinking this. When asked by his friend what he thought of the show, the man stood next to me in the crowd said; “I love Wild Beasts, I really do. But close my eyes and I might as well be sat at home listening to the CD.”

The band is clearly talented (you don’t get a Mercury nomination for nothing) but do nothing to show off this talent. Each member seemed shy and hid behind their instruments. Hayden Thorpe, the bands’ front man, was the main offender. When facing the crowd he mostly kept his eyes shut and when playing keyboards he’d only have been able to see the crowd out of the corner of his eye.

When the band’s guitarist spoke to the crowd before singing lead vocals on a track himself, it came as quite a shock. Asking us if we minded him playing “an old song”, Fleming came across as a much more natural front man than Hayden Thorpe, who didn’t say a word to the crowd all night. From this point forward it was hard not to view Thorpe as more of a secondary member of the band than the front man of a Mercury-nominated group.

By no means was the gig a bad one though. As I mentioned above, the band is clearly talented. Each note was played as perfectly as you hear it on record, which can be tricky when you’ve spent a long time in the studio recording each part of a track separately.

A big boost of confidence and bit of movement on stage would make the band far more of a live draw. As it stands however, I’m more than happy to keep listening to the CD at home.

Originally published on Brighton Noise.