STACK #126 Apr 2016

MUSIC

COVER 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

T here are few Wombats in the 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 him: he is the world’s first – and only – Norwegian wombat). But mere minutes in their company will swiftly convince you that they could hail from nowhere else on this planet but the north-western English port city of Liverpool. Crammed into the bunker-like confines of an underground venue in Melbourne’s inner city after dark, one quiet weekday evening in February, The Wombats had the crowd in the palm of their hands in no time at all. They were knock-skipping through Australia for a promotional visit on the eve of their new album Glitterbug 's release , and even the jaded cynics in the crowd had to admit that seeing a band who graduated to larger venues some years ago, fly their colours long and loud in a sweaty club, was pretty impressive. But, perhaps not unexpectedly, it’s The Wombats who get the fanatics up front for that something special. This evening English city of Liverpool. STACK would be betting on about… three.

stalker depicted in the rip-roaringly funny (and very dark) clip for the album’s lead single GreekTragedy, wherein The Wombats are killed off one by one by a fan who appears initially to be sweetly normal and dedicated to her favourite band, but by the final frames has proved to be the exact opposite. See the clip yourself to view the end result of her murderous rampage: it’s wonderful proof that young pop bands can still carry off a black (very, very black) sense of humour. “We’ve all got fairly dark senses of humour, yes,” Murph concurs. “It was just the perfect way to start the whole thing. The prosthetic guy, the legend, looks like a bit of a diva on set. It was a lot of fun to film; I just think we should do more videos like that. We should just be dying in weirder ways!” If wombats are thin on the ground in Liverpool these days, they’ve been sighted quite often in Los Angeles, California recently. Murph 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

I’m twisting my life up to get these songs out... I found the need to create something slightly more tumultuous, a bit weirder than the reality of my life.

it’s a hardcore female fan, holding – you guessed it – a furry toy Wombat. "That girl was definitely a character,” remembers frontman Matt Murphy, speaking from the UK. “She had a reversible Superman costume on, which was quite impressive. She was basically doing costume changes during the gig. It was very, very bizarre. Especially with that level of jetlag, that happening in front of you – is very bizarre.” While a girl in a reversible Superman costume holding a wombat is perhaps a little offbeat, it’s nothing to the uberfan/

APRIL 2015 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.com.au

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