Just as you would struggle to identify a 30-year-old from his or her baby pictures, indie music has grown into something unrecognisable since its post-punk years. Faced with a genre that covers such a vast range of guitar-based music, it’s always useful to remember that indie bands divide roughly into two sorts: the ones that Liam Gallagher might like; and the ones he wouldn’t. With a fancy for falsetto, rhythms that drop in and out without establishing themselves and song titles such as Vigil for a Fuddy Duddy, you can guess which category the Cumbrian quartet Wild Beasts belong to. Indeed, should Gallagher ever find himself stuck in a lift that is playing their music, it’s a near certainty that the confused, angry surge to his synapses would incinerate his mental fusebox.

Anyone tempted by that notion will surely find something of value in Wild Beasts’ debut album. As with their live shows, Hayden Thorpe’s voice – a buttoned-up echo of Billy MacKenzie – is the musical centre of gravity here. On Woebegone Wanderers, his band, seemingly in tangle-footed pursuit of his lyrical deviations, switch from locomotive rattle to arty waltz-time tea dance and back in just under five minutes. Hear it the first time and it sounds like an intriguing mess. Slowly though, the bewilderment gives way to admiration and, finally, an embrace of their apartness. Years ago, John Peel – who, you suspect, would have loved Wild Beasts – would have nursed us through the whole process. Now we’ll just have to do it ourselves.

Their catchiest song, The Devil’s Crayon, is Wild Beasts’ attempt to rustle up something danceable. But, save for perhaps a brace of Orange Juice’s most effete moments, funk never sounded as limp-wristed as this. Recalling the erudite libido that coursed through the quill of the young Morrissey, The Old Dog takes off with a reference to “casual sex with a hard-up thug”, before finally declaring: “Darling, I regret there’s life in the old dog yet.”

Speaking to The Times at the end of last year, Wild Beasts did a good impression of four young men trying their best to make killer pop music. Limbo, Panto is even produced by Tore Johansson, who helped to transform the Cardigans and Franz Ferdinand into streamlined, disciplined tunesmiths. But, whatever the understanding between band and producer, Limbo, Panto sees the marvellously untutored magnificence of last year’s early singles blessedly intact. If you imagine the other runners and riders of 2008 as hungry young thoroughbreds, look at Wild Beasts as a pantomime horse trying its best to fit in. But in that lies something oddly, intangibly heroic.

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