After a summer of festivals which has taken them from the backstreets of their native Liverpool (Matthew Street Festival) all the way to the idyll of Malawi (the unique Lake of Stars Festival), The Wombats release this EP at the end of August as an enticing taster for their full-length debut, 'A Guide To Love, Loss And Desperation'. Presumably the summer got in the way of finishing the latter, hence the wait until late October.

Drummer Dan bangs out a stomping, tight and constant beat, accompanied with equal gusto by his fellow Scouser (with curiously non-Scouse accent) on supple vocals and choppy guitars. Norwegian Tord completes the three-piece on an ever distorted bass.
On first listen, you'd be forgiven for thinking The Wombats are another faux-dishevelled Indie band making tired references, with production and instrumentation to match. But they're not. In fact, their lyrics and production alike put pay to any such theory, and instead both are intricate and with a canny touch of irony.

The limited edition EP contains five tracks, all of which will appear on the forthcoming album - plus a nifty electro remix here of 'Kill the Director' courtesy of CSS. The original version of the latter was their first single, and the rip-roaring 2 minutes 45 seconds serves as a perfect nutshelled package of their sound. Rather than the apparently 'edgy' raw sound of some of their contemporaries, the production here is refreshingly elaborate, with a good few layers of both vocals and guitars. And as a nice plus it's scored them the random honour of playing out the credits on BBC1's 'Football Focus' for the whole of this season.

All five songs on display here are "everyday" without succumbing to the mundane or tiresomely obvious. Even where perhaps, for me, they do sound a bit too teeny and Jack-Penate-ee, on opener 'Backfire at the Disco', they manage to swing it back in their favour by coating it interestingly with a high harmonied 'waooohs' more reminiscent of Mew.

Right from the birth of the band where they confess to trying to be 'a joke they didn't want anyone to find funny', The Wombats have the clever ability to have massive mainstream appeal and to be simultaneously mocking this - a bit like the lyrics of their forthcoming single: "Let's dance to Joy Division and celebrate the irony." The sold-out UK on which they currently find themselves confirms the fact that The Wombats are about to take off.