When the Wombats first suggested "Let’s Dance to Joy Division" on A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation, their 2007 debut, they came on strong with a blend of jumpy indie rock and lovable goof personas. Their follow-up, 2011’s This Modern Glitch, followed suit. But in the four years between their second and third albums, the sweet silliness has dissipated. With Glitterbug, the Wombats have repositioned themselves as more pained, serious characters, longing to get away from the life of excessive parties and settle into a meaningful relationship. At their worst, they degenerate into sleaze, delivering lines like "There‘s no greater sight than you in your underwear removing mine."
Many of the synth-tinged songs on Glitterbug would sound right at home on a John Hughes soundtrack, and the album itself plays like a rom-com concept album, chronicling singer and guitarist Matthew Murphy’s long-distance romantic relationship with a girl he began dating in L.A. while he was still based in London ("My head is aching in GMT," he sings in a polite Robert Smith-style pout on "Give Me a Try"). It’s ironic that a band whose singer once sang "if this is a rom-com, kill the director" would be putting forth something like this. But there’s more drama here than in previous works: Maybe Murphy is killing the director himself. The number of drug references within the lyrics would seem like teenage exaggeration were it not for Murphy’s matter-of-fact delivery. There’s no "The Wombats Proudly Present" as a subtitle to Glitterbug, as there was for the first two releases. Perhaps because the Wombats as you knew them aren’t present, and they don’t always seem proud.
Glitterbug mostly seems like it was born of a frustration of not having made it in the States yet. The defining moment of the album comes when all the instruments drop out of "Give Me a Try" and Murphy proclaims, "We could be gigantic!" If you asked him, he'd probably say it was the girl in L.A., but he seems to also be not-so-covertly courting potential American fans. You can hear the same beseeching subtext in the single, "Your Body Is a Weapon", where Murphy sings "Is it such fantasy that I should think someone like you could love a creep like me?"
And the Wombats are seemingly pulling out all the stops to be gigantic. Instead of using a number of producers, as they did with their previous two releases, the Wombats recorded most of the tracks at the studio of Mark Crew, who can be credited with fast-tracking Bastille into U.S. arenas. And as with Bastille and other short-haired Euro rockers like Coldplay, Keane and Snow Patrol, there’s a very palatable poppy sheen on all of these tracks: Glitterbug is packed with anthemic hooks and synth pulses that sound like they were composed solely to lure Lexus. But what sets the Wombats apart from those acts is the lechery and squalor just beneath the surface. And when a car company inevitably co-opts one of the songs for a commercial, those in the know can quietly laugh at the wild disconnect with the subject matter.
