The Wombats haven’t half made themselves easy targets, what with the not-terribly-funny funny songs of their 2007 debut album – a record so dated you might expect secondrate standups to do observational routines about it: “Remember Let’s Dance to Joy Division? Eh? What was all that about?” – and the attempt to go slinky and sleek on its followup. It’s album No 3 now, and they’re still a truly popular group, but are they any good? They’re nowhere near as bad as the critical consensus suggests – you’d have to be Paris Hilton singing a British Eurovision entry to be that bad – but they’re utterly unmemorable. Glitterbug ups the gloss, bringing in sequenced dance rhythms, though often of the kind – as on This Is Not a Party – that sound like they were taken from close study of a 1991 edition of Now!, and Matthew “Murph” Murphy is still nowhere near as witty as he’d like to think he is. It’s got “grimly competent” written all over it, but that doesn’t make Glitterbug awful – just desperately uninvolving if you’re not already one of the zealots.
