‘Smother’ is the third album by Wild Beasts, four young men from Kendal on a trajectory that took them from Kendal to Leeds to London, who make music that retains the sensitive observational quality of being an ‘outsider’ informed by the intimacy of a childhood spent in the Lake District. Like its predecessors ‘Limbo, Panto’ and the Mercury-nominated ‘Two Dancers’, it is a genuinely brave, beautiful record that stands outside the vicissitudes of fashion, and sounds like nothing so much as itself. If ‘Two Dancers’ was a night on the tiles, dizzy and giddy and pulsing with hedonism, then ‘Smother’ is pillowtalk....