Review Summary: What is the soap that washes down 99% of dirt and bacteria together with all talent?
British Indie scene has had a rough time since the 90s. After the mighty fall of britpop, the following wave of so called post-britpop has with a few exceptions proven to be a line of abhorrently dreadful, uninspired wishy-washy acts that inherited the cheesiness and gullible silliness of britpop, but not its energy or instrumental finesse. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that a genre made to capitalise on a past success of now extinct other genre didn’t last for very long either. But the British scene needed to fill the void with someone else singing “
I wanna get a college girl drunk tonight” (that is honest to god a line on the song “Turn” here). Thankfully, at that time Arctic Monkeys became probably the first artists to ever find fame through internet and the new craze in indie oriented rock music began.
However, another strange phenomenon could be observed in these times of change. Apparently, the once prominent britpop bands were still trying to come through with britpop records, while post-britpop acts were still trying to do their thing as well, both at times, when their influence was already less than minimal. And now we can see it happening again with the once new wave of indie rock from the 2000s-2010s. Those bands are still trying to wow us with their washed out, boring music and more than before, they fail.
It should be obvious by now that I am dragging out the introduction. That is only because there is hardly anything to talk about, when it comes to this particular album. If anything should be found surprising about it, it’s that it isn’t all reliant on daft electronic arrangement and production, as many of its contemporaries do, but instead the band actually still does play rea instruments, even if utmost blandly. The song-writing is not half-bad either. Every now and then an actually decent tune pops up, but still never striking enough to make you forgive the drabness of the thing.
What can be said about this is only: “yeah sure okay fine”. The Wombats are not trying to impress. They are way past that point already. All they can really do is keep on writing those simple songs with witty, silly lyrics and keep the instrumental side fine enough not to be hated on actively. And they do that. And the album sounds accordingly. And that’s all there is to it.
