The Wombats - 'Moving To New York'
I wonder what it is about relocating to America that provides such fertile ground for songwriters? I remember there was a track on the first Art Brut album called 'Moving to LA', which a handful of online reviewers who didn't like the album seized upon with glee ("'Moving to LA', eh? They shouldn't hurry back, they won't be missed! Ha! Ha! Ha!" etc.) I promise not to take any obvious potshots like that in this review. I might be cheap, but I'm not that cheap.
(Those of you wondering precisely how cheap I am, it's probably written on a toilet wall somewhere if you look hard enough.)
My thought when the first verse came in was, "oh, it's that voice again". Not because I've heard Matthew Murphy sing before, but because there's a type of vocal affectation that strikes a lot of singers where you overenunciate all of your consonants and slacken all of your vowels, and it's not an unpleasant sound at all, but I've heard it so much from so many lead singers now that I'm starting to suspect that nobody in the world has a natural singing voice that really sounds like that.
The upside to this, of course, is that at least you can hear all the words properly, which is handy when you're a fuddy-duddy like me who's noticed with alarm that he's started to use the phrase "but it's just noise" more and more lately.
The song itself, mind, has a lot going for it. The frantic bassline sets a speedy pace that the entire song has to race to keep up with, meaning that this is one of those Road Runner-type songs that shoots past you in a cloud of smoke, arriving and going again in what feels like an instant, leaving you (as Wile E Coyote, natch) blinking widely at the camera and possibly holding up a small sign reading "egad!" as you try to process everything you've just witnessed. Except because this is a song and not a long-legged bird, you've can just hit the skip-back button to have another listen at your own leisure and really soak it in.
There's a lot to be said for pop songs that don't overstay their welcome and reward multiple listenings, and this is one of them. The song constantly does the bait-and-switch with you, choosing to throw lots of ideas at the wall rather than stick to a specific song structure, and it really works well: the brashness and unpredictability just adds to the song's charm. I suspect in time these guys will calm down a little bit once they've been exposed to some old-fashioned muso cynicism, but right now I admire their ambition and their joy in experimentation. It's so infectious that I'm almost tempted to write that jazz-ska-skiffle-blues-pop-indie-rap fusion song I've been mulling over in my head for ages...
Download: Out now
CD Released: January 14th
(Steve Perkins)
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