Love, lust, infatuation and attraction are the staple themes of not just music, but also literature, film and the visual arts. Every now and then a song like "Mecca" comes along, with a 'fresh' and non-cliched examination of this perennial theme, reminding me of the primacy of romance, love and sex in human experience. Hayden Thorpe's soulfully evocative vocals insist that love is an urgently primal and spiritual experience: 'All we want is to feel that feeling again/ Just a drop on the lips and we're more than equipped/ There is some thirst that's gotta be quenched, yeah'.
While the secular genres of pop, rap and hip hop often banalize and trivialize love and sex, Wild Beasts' blend of indie rock and quiet storm R&B effectively imbue it with religious and spiritual connotations ('I'm a pilgrim, you're the shrine to ...We've a Mecca now, weave a Mecca now, no less') that transcend time and history (Cause all we want is to know the vivid moment/ Yeah, how we feel now was felt by the ancients). Despite their band name, Wild Beasts' lyricism (on this song, at least) doesn't dwell on female sexual objectification, pure carnality or mere physical pleasure: 'Where the body goes the mind will follow soon after'.As Pitchfork's Ian Cohen has noted, Wild Beasts is notably exemplary for their unusual representation of male desire: "As unique as they’ve been musically, Wild Beasts' candid carnality has made them far more rare in the boy’s club of rock music than you’d been led to believe. Uncoupling masculinity from cartoon machismo, indie slackerdom, teenage neediness, and brooding distance, Wild Beasts presented modern man as a libidinous creature burdened by expectations and failed by his body, both hunter-aggressor and prey to their own insecurities and embarrassments."
The quartet may be from the supposedly 'rough', working class, northern England farming town of Kendal (they are now based in London), but on this track any working class masculine posturing (or class struggle polemic) takes a backseat to the delicate, dreamy and shimmering instrumentals that articulate that deep, burgeoning desire to relive the elusive 'vivid moment' of lovers in perfect harmony with one another. "Mecca" is just one example of the stellar music on display in the quartet's fourth and latest album Present Tense (2014), which has received widespread critical acclaim and has been hailed as a "modern classic".
