There's something about the heat of the summer months that makes us crave dumbly enjoyable entertainment, and it is in that spirit that this Liverpudlian trio is finally releasing its splashy, deliciously moronic debut stateside. Though the Wombats' first record came out in the UK last year, the art school chums were smart to wait for temperatures to rise in the colonies before unleashing A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation. After all, even the snootiest art-house snob will spend sizzling July afternoons in meat-locker-cold multiplexes watching the latest explosion-ridden popcorn flicks, and this hooky, snotty collection is the aural equivalent of, say, Transformers or Indiana Jones. It's predictable, formulaic, often funny, and, with song titles like "Let's Dance to Joy Division", maddening in its attempt to capture the zeitgeist. But it's also broadly appealing in an uncontroversial way and fun as hell once you've given in to its sneaky charms.
Sure, this is an album full of the kind of shouty, lager-drunk pop that Kaiser Chiefs, the Cribs, and Arctic Monkeys have all already graced NME covers for making, but the Wombats distinguish themselves from their fellow countrymen with some impressively supple vocal harmonies and a broad sense of humor. In fact, they might be the first of this most recent post-millennial wave of often indistinguishable Brit dance-pop artists to be enjoyable because they don't seem to take themselves (or their songs) that seriously. A Whiffenpoof-worthy a cappella opener, "Tales Of Girls, Boys & Marsupials", on which they use just those six words, stellar harmonies, and lots of jittery handclaps to preview the record's themes, proves their music school pedigree. But the rest of the album is a bit more predictable. The Wombats are at their best on songs like "Kill The Director", a simmering pub-dance track about the sad truth behind the clichés in soap operas and chic flicks. The song's name-dropping-- sample lyric: "If this is a rom-com, kill the director/ Please...This is no Bridget Jones"-- may not serve these boys well when it comes to the longevity of their legacy, but celebrating disposable culture is precisely the point of these joyously disposable hooks.
While many of their melodies are infectious, it's true that many of their songs shouldn't be as enjoyable as they are. "Let's Dance To Joy Division", for example, is a blatant pitch to get played at those same indie dance nights where Ian Curtis' band is a staple. But despite its hokey premise (and the fact that it contains cringe-worthy lyrics like "Let the love tear us apart,/ I've found the cure for a broken heart"), its English children's choir (you can practically hear the school uniforms on the singers as they chant the chorus along with frontman Matthew Murphy), over-caffeinated rhythms, and power pop glee are rousing nonetheless. And "Patricia The Stripper", with its self-explanatory storyline of a "coked-up, Botox girl" who works the pole for a living, mixes rote dance punk cymbals with out-of-place moments of Coldplay falsetto for something akin to a Killers song delivered in an even heavier than usual British burr.
Luckily, the band understands their limitations, so most of these tracks maintain interest by keeping their subjects straightforward and simple-- going to the doctor, moving to New York, having schoolyard crushes, dancing-- and never deviating from the breathless pace set by drummer Dan Haggis. And though their passable guitar parts-- all choppy downstrokes and wiry, insistent clangs-- lose their exuberance as the record stretches on, for at least the album’s first six tracks, they are played with such adolescent gusto that it's hard not to be won over. So crank up the A/C and turn up the volume; one suspects that this record, like summer itself, has a limited shelf life.
