Live Review: The Wombats’ Album Launch at London Supper Club – 14th April 2011
If you search deep within the winding lanes of Westbourne Park, you’ll stumble across London’s elusive and prestigious Supper Club. Tonight’s main event belongs to that of the Wombats; it is the album launch of the band’s second record, ‘This Modern Glitch.’ (Read John’s review of the album here.)
Upon entry, one realises that this is very intimate occasion. The majority of tonight’s audience consists of friends and family of the Scousers. The lighted stage at the front of the club indicates one thing: the Wombats intend on performing the highly-anticipated new tracks. Clad in white suits, the band, led by lead singer Matthew Murphy, leap onto the stage. Despite the familiar audience, they play as if to 500 strangers. The amount of dedicated concentration that the Wombats emit is uncanny. Even whilst regularly switching between guitar, bass and also synthesiser, the three-part-harmonies always remain consistent and note-perfect.
It is bizarre to recognise that the band have only released one long-play record in the past; their debut rocker, ‘A Guide to Love Loss and Desperation.’ If one wonders why the group has received so much fame for only one musical effort, it is due to the sheer fact that the album was a perfect execution of dance-based pop/rock. All the hits are played tonight, including a superb ‘Moving To New York.’ However, as Murphy states, tonight is not so much based on the past, but the present. Diving headfirst into a barrage of the group’s most exciting new tracks, it is mandatory to recall record-opener ‘Our Perfect Disease’ and ‘1996.’ The songs are catchy, and heavily keyboard-driven. The transition between the two records is noticeable, as the latter produces a far more matured Wombats. As ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Jump Into The Fog’ are performed, the two previous singles are more than enough to sustain singing from every person in the white-walled club.
Promising to play the album in its entirety through the speakers after the show, the band close with the unmistakably distorted notes of ‘Let’s Dance To Joy Division’ to a frenzy of mosh pits. From what we’ve heard tonight, ‘This Modern Glitch’ truly lives up to the ascending stature that the Wombats have created for themselves in 4 short years.
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