From Playing Schools to Top of the Charts
So The Wombats stuck, and after a year, they shrugged their shoulders and let history happen. This week the popular New Music Express chart in the UK showed their hit “Let’s Dance to Joy Division” knocking out the Hives for the top single in the land. They mentioned they had already been on a small U.S. tour, playing in tiny bars for a few enthusiastic fans. I wondered if the number and size of the venues wouldn’t triple the next time around.

Earlier this year the much sought after band signed to UK label 14th Floor. “We got signed,” Dan says, “because we did a ridiculous amount of touring and already had a fan base.”

Their first album, A Guide to Love, Loss, and Desperation is out this week. Fourteenth Floor had the honors partly due to an A&R connection they had worked with releasing singles in the past. While “quite a few” labels had come knocking at their door after they played SxSW in Austin last March, they are confident that 14th Floor (which has a lot of singer-songwriters on their roster) was right for them simply because their middle-man “totally gets who we are.”

“We had complete control with this record,” Dan says. “We negotiated the contract that way. The label told us what they would like, but we had the last say.”

Indie Doo Wop/Wombat Rock
But about what sound exactly did the Wombats have the last say? As with a lot of popular music, the Wombats’ sound is a socially acceptable form of addiction and pleasure. They give you contagious Doo wop harmonies, memorable melodic hooks, a driving rhythm, and smart lyrics. There’s something comfortable and familiar about their sound, which will at times draw comparisons to The Strokes guitars and the Franz Ferdinand Bass, occasional Forward Russia! rhythms. Yet their ability to incorporate keyboards, strings, and harmonicas, to pen grin-worthy lyrics, and layer harmonies will defy easy classifications. When you ask the guys about their influences their identity makes sense.

They’ve been playing in bands since they were 15 or 16. I asked what were they listening to in those formative years which often play an unconscious role in a band’s composition of sounds.

“This!” says Tord pointing a finger heavenward. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was playing. We chuckled.