The Wombats – Our Perfect Disease
This single review was submitted by Philip Lickley, who runs the music blog Wav Goodbye.
The mouthful of an album The Wombats Proudly Present: This Modern Glitch reached an impressive number three in the charts and is, itself, a fantastic album that attracts clichés like ‘every song could be a single’ and ‘full of poppy hooks’ like a magnet. Though it attracts them quite fairly as it is a tour de force of an album, one that can balance some singable poppy tracks with an orchestral ode to drug addiction very well, the singles from the album have really failed to make any impact on the public. The last two releases of ‘Anti-D’ and ‘Techno Fan’, following singles of ‘Tokyo (Vampires and Wolves)’ and ‘Jump Into The Fog’, failed to make it into the top forty so it’s a surprise that the men in suits have commissioned a fifth single, in album opener ‘Our Perfect Disease’.
Though, in an era of digital downloads over physical releases, I suppose there’s not as many costs to prohibit the umpteenth release from an album. That is providing that the budget for the video is kept tighter than a Yorkshire man’s purse-strings, which it is. And I’m from Yorkshire so I can get away with that.
Now with exactly half of the album tracks turned into singles, it’s clear that the well for singles has run dry with the perfectly serviceable, but frankly ordinary, video for the track consisting of them performing the song in what seems to be a dentist’s surgery, with the only budget going on some x-rays, a night vision filter for Windows Movie Maker and a machine that measures an imaginary person’s heartbeat which, naturally dies at the end of the track.
But don’t let the cut-back video put you off. ‘Our Perfect Disease’ is as good a single as any of the others – featuring The Wombats’ trademark mix of cleverly composed lyrics, synth, drums and guitar, which build up as the track finds its footing. What is an almost perfect song for the opening of an album becomes just as good on the radio with a catchy, poppy chorus and some memorable instrumental solos, vocal breaks and even some clichéd ‘woo-woo’ sections that work. Can I get away with saying that a song called ‘Our Perfect Disease’ is ‘infectious’ and ‘catchy’? Well I’ve written it, so we’ll see…
Sure, it’ll be lucky to scrape into the top hundred behind every cut from Amy Winehouse’s back catalogue, but if you haven’t picked up the album yet then grab a copy of this song. Actually, scratch that, go and buy the album and get five singles and five other cracking tracks.
Click here to buy Our Perfect Disease from the All-Noise music store.
