STACK NZ Apr #61

MUSIC

FEATURE

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Fame, lust, the paparazzi, love and destiny:TheWombats tackle all this and more on new album Glitterbug . By Jonathan Alley All That Glitters

T here are few Wombats in the English city of Liverpool. STACK would be betting on about… three. One might conceivably exist in a zoo – the other two being in a band. Truth be told, there are three members of The Wombats, but their bassist is Norwegian (you have to hand it to him: he is the world’s first – and only – Norwegian wombat). But if wombats are thin on the ground in Liverpool these days, they’ve been sighted quite often in Los Angeles, California recently. Frontman Matt Murphy took an extended sojourn to the City of Angels (and in fact is considering a move back), and the inspiration he took from the legendarily surreal town fuelled much of Glitterbug ; the city is a larger background character in the story of a relationship Murph insists is purely fictional. “It’s a very bizarre town," he explains over the phone from the UK. "A town

mind’s telling me no, but my body’s telling me yes.' The emoji or emoticon references are just a quick way of spraying cold water on a potentially hot situation. I just thought Emoticons was a cool title for a song, way before even writing that song. So, I don’t know if I’m making this definitive statement about social media in 2015 or whatever. It should have been called Emojis, because emoticons are different to emojis – which someone wonderfully pointed out to me.” At the end of the day, pop music and life intersect in weird ways. For Murph, the whole experience of making and touring Glitterbug is partially about everything coming full circle. "The creepiest thing was, I’m twisting my life up to get these songs out. I’d stay in LA and – there was a point where everything kind of went full circle and became real, and now I’m in a relationship, we’re touring in LA, and in the UK,” he reflects. ”I was never expecting that, because everything was so solid back home for me, hence why I found the need to create something that was slightly more tumultuous or just a bit weirder than the reality of my life.“

where A-list actors can become down-and- out actors who have ‘lost their way' a bit, living in a wing of their homes. There is still a lot of love in the air. It’s going to eat and swallow you up... yeah, there’s a lot of broken dreams there.“ Listening to Glitterbug , it could be the audio equivalent of an Instagram account – just darker, funnier, and with audio accompaniment. Songs like Your Body’s a Weapon and This is Not a Party give us all an inside view of the snapshots behind the songs; a mad night out here, a surreal scene in a strange place there. And not all of them are based on Murphy’s LA experiences either – Your Body’s a Weapon being one case in point. “I went to a Brit Awards after-party and Harry Styles was there, and I was walking out – in the days when I was still smoking. I was walking out behind him to go have a cigarette, and some kind of suicidal-looking paparazzi took a picture of him, and that’s where the idea spawned. Like a first person narrative of a creepy paparazzi guy, following someone around.” The album’s other ‘big’ song after Greek Traged y is Emoticons . But Murph is using social media as a metaphor, rather than explicitly singing about the tiny symbols that substitute words for emotions on all manner of social media. “That song is about – to quote the legendary R. Kelly – ‘My

Glitterbug by The Wombats is due out on April 17

APRIL 2015 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.co.nz

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