Artist: Wombats
Album: Guide To Love Loss And Desperation
Website: MySpace

Two Liverpudlians and a Norwegian met at Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, formed a band, and called themselves Wombats. These marsupial aesthetes know a good hook when they hear one, and manage to deliver one memorably listenable pop-punk song after another with a surprising amount of pastiche, no doubt culled from influences as diverse as Rufus Wainwright, Arcade Fire, Smashing Pumpkins and Johnny Cash.

{mosgoogle right}It’s not exactly characteristic of a genre so often fraught with self conscious posturing. Refreshingly, they even have the nerve to not list The Sex Pistols as influences. It may not be typical, but then neither are the glittering choruses and sweeping New Pornographers-inspired woo-wooing in the background of the first track, "Backfire at the Disco", in which lead singer-guitarist Matthew Murphy’s voice gives this lament of a date-gone-wrong all the credible frustration it requires. They add the panache of three-part harmonies without losing any of the grit, and musically, it makes for quite a smart maneuver.

A long summary explanation of Wombats’ themes would normally go here but they’ve done all the hard work already on their second track "Kill the Director" : “So with the angst of a teenage band / Here's another song about a gender I'll never understand.”

"Little Miss Pipedream", the closest they get to a slow number, adds more than enough humor, with a reference to Oliver Reed drinking tequilas, and the most hysterically awkward use of the word ‘fulcrum’ ever written into a song.

What makes Guide To Love Loss And Desperation sound so remarkable is that the band comes off like more than just a tossed salad of musical influences. They produce incongruously cheery pop-punk that dares to leave you singing along all day at school or on the job. The resulting mix is indelible, but not deliberate. They probably couldn’t tell you where every song came from either.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."