album review: the wombats, 'glitterbug'

The Wombats are back!

The name "The Wombats" is so freaking weird!

I like exclamation marks!

Okay, so the Wombats, right? There was  A Guide to Love, Loss and Desperation in 2007 and This Modern Glitch in 2011. These albums were indie rock, fun and dancey, post-punky goodness being thrown around with tracks like Let's Dance To Joy Division (which I adore by the way) and Tokyo (Vampires and Wolves), silliness in Tales of Boys, Girls and Marsupials, and generally the usual thing you would expect from bands like them.

However, they have now released Glitterbug. And the first thing to come to mind is...damn. I first heard Greek Tragedy on 8tracks which was what honestly spurred me to do my research and get their first two albums and the Britishness of their pop culture references and guitar riffs was not lost on me. I loved it. So, Glitterbug has been a serious anticipation of mine since I heard of it.

In the process of listening, I was thrilled to hear tracks like Your Body Is A Weapon, Greek Tragedy and Give Me A Try which I had already heard before, but in terms of newness, I adored The English Summer and Isabel. Reading reviews from other websites, it was pointed out that the album chronicled the relationship between an English Boy and California girl, albeit vaguely which provided a new outlook on the album. Greek Tragedy lyrically talks about an apparently extremely hot girl that "hits like ecstasy", Give Me A Try explores the dating scene of the current tech generation. There's a lot of sex talk, most of it not even masked but that isn't really new, is it?

In general, the whole album is filled with sick hooks that have their veritable hooks in me (no pun intended) and they remain stuck in my head after each track. They have their indie-rock, post-punk thing still going, but this album is significantly better than the other two, which is saying something. It is also darker than the other albums which had an air of disco silliness about them.

Suffice to say, I love it, although there is more pop on this than there was on the other two and they kind of left behind the indie disco thing they had going on, but pop is not a bad thing. It ties the album together, makes it pretty.

Check out their Soundcloud for peeks into the album and go to iTunes to download the album.

Listen to Greek Tragedy below and in the sidebar.