Oh we smokin’ up the windows…

[Video][Website]
[3.86]

Mallory O’Donnell: 2004, meet 1998. 1998, meet 1993. Oh, wait.
[2]

Martin Skidmore: I like the electronica backing much more than the rest of the standard-indie playing, but that’s mostly because the latter is so lifeless. The singing makes an effort, which you can’t always say for indie, but it’s not matched by its quality, and there’s no song to speak of. Less annoying than usual from them, I guess.
[3]

Jer Fairall: That oppressive synth riff is kinda neat, but both the vocals and the lyrics are trying way too hard to sell us on their jaded cynicism. I was somehow not surprised to learn that they have an earlier single called “Let’s Dance To Joy Division.”
[4]

Anthony Easton: Their single about Joy Divison was one of the most delightfully perverse reworkings of musical history recently. This is a little too ambitious — the church choirs should be cut — but I still love his voice.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: As post-Coldplay Britschlock goes, this has a more tolerable swoop and sparkle to its arrangement than most, and occasionally a word or two sounds intriguing. Or maybe I just have a soft spot for chubby marsupials (late ’70s/early ’80s California rock band the Tazmanian Devils were way better, though. So, probably, were ’80s Cleveland garage revival band the Wombats).
[4]

Iain Mew: I’ve never been a fan as such, but I did always like The Wombats a lot more than their landfill indie contemporaries because they were more interested in actually putting some energy and invention into what they did rather than just sticking with secondhand studied cool. This certainly delivers on that level, with a hyperactively swtiching structure and some fantastically forceful slices of synth noise, but is utterly ruined by its lyrics. Having left a bar in Tokyo in their previous single, this one appears to start by checking into a love hotel. The singer’s inisistent that he’s only there because he wants to do something different with his boring day, rather than due to any merits of his partner; he wants things to be sordid, and he charmingly says that the condition of the venue is “not a big problem with me, love/you don’t look that hygenic anyway”. All of which is rather unedifying as well as not as funny as he thinks, but it’s when the chorus goes “I just hope that it’s your bones that shatter, not mine” that the attitidue gets too close to abusive for any amount of great sounds to make up for it. In other words, now I know how Katherine felt about Mike Posner.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: I didn’t like the Killers the first time around.
[4]