The Wombats - This ModernGlitch

Thu 28th Apr, 2011 in Music Reviews

The Wombats return with their highly anticipated second album, This Modern Glitch. The follow up to 2007’s The Wombats Proudly Present… A Guide To Love Loss & Desperation, contains the same knack for hook-laden, sugar-doused indie pop as the debut, whilst bringing in heavy dance influences and slightly dryer undertones in the lyrics department. The album tackles the dance floor, but also tackles issues such as depression, and is definitely a more grown-up approach, however it still contains the panache and vibrancy from the boys with floral guitars that people love them for, and then some.

The album opener Our Perfect Disease, isn’t the type of energy usually show-cased by The Wombats, it’s a slow start, broody and mature (apart from the ‘woo’-ing). It offers an insight into what direction the album will be going in, which is a very dance orientated effort, laced with synth. Tokyo (Vampires and Wolves) brings back the energy of the band after the subdued opening. With its disco keys, and the heavily bouncing bass of Tord Øverland-Knudsen, lead singer, Matthew Murphy, wails over the top of it all, in anthem-like-fashion ”if you love me let me go, back to that bar in Tokyo”, creating something as catchy as anything off their debut.

Liverpuldian trio managed to make Jump Into The Fog a song that’s quite perverse in ways (it’s about going home with a sleazy girl to an even sleazier hotel) an innocent, PG-rated venture. However the choir in the chorus is a bit too sweet, even for The Wombats. Anti-D, a ballad of sorts, it’s songs like this that make it easy to understand why the band will be touring with Take That later this year. Its upbeat take on melancholy is refreshing, as this is probably one of the albums stand out tracks. And while its lyrics are clunky, they are ever flowing and ridiculously catchy.

Techno Fan gives it’s pretty obvious statement of intent from the get-go, as it opens in a very doof-doof manner, although I wouldn’t expect to a Tiesto remix of this anytime soon. The chorus of “I never knew I was a techo fan” is accompanied by The Wombats trademark “ooo wah oh ooo’s” as the band try to keep an original twist on the synth-theme that’s dominated the album thus far.

This Modern Glitch sinks deeper into the dangerous territory of ‘filler tracks’ with 1996. The track is a real bore, with opening keys that sound like the opening five seconds to Rebecca Black’s Friday, cheesy lyrics, and the even cheesier ”da da da’s” that see the song out.

Walking Disasters sees the band climb out of the hole they appeared to be digging for themselves. Combining the indie-rock qualities of their first album, with the dance elements of this one, lead by the heavy percussion of Dan Haggis, and the quirky lyrics – “I will be your Freudian slip”. The album closer, Schumacher The Champagne, is a decent send-off but is more along the lines of classic Wombats. The dance-floor anthem feel disappears for the final track, as it is heavily guitar orientated, and distorted guitar at that, stepping away from the glossy feel that is imprinted on the majority of the bands back catalogue.

This Modern Glitch is out now through Warner.