Live Review: The Wombats

The Wombats - synths, lights, balloons, cheerleaders and all - are back in Australia with their own headline tour after appearing earlier in the year for Splendour In The Grass.

Casually dressed, the trio appear on stage and waste no time in kicking off the set with Cheetah Tongue from their most recent album Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life. Alternating between big synth sounds and guitar, there’s little pause between songs as they fly through Give Me A Try and Black Flamingo, with its catchy chorus "I wanna love you but it hurts, hurts, hurts".

Crowd interaction is sparse and the focus is more on pumping out music. Lead singer and guitarist Matthew Murphy only hesitates long enough to announce, "This is the third time we’ve played this song live," before launching into Ice Cream. Its harsher guitar sound fills the room while Tord Øverland Knudsen runs, jumps and head-bops more than any bass player ever has. 

The graphics behind the band are simple but effective, incorporating different images of wombats, wombat-shaped ice cream and wombat emojis. Towards the end of the night, big balloons are unleashed on the crowd during Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves). There’s more to come for one of their biggest hits, Let’s Dance To Joy Division, with cheerleaders and people dancing in fluffy wombat suits flooding the stage. 

There’s not much of a shift in dynamics. Every song is high-energy and fast-paced, at least until Lethal Combination, which Murphy performs solo with an acoustic guitar. Encores seem to have become a little too common, so it’s nice to see The Wombats announce they have two more songs and then stick with it. Greek Tragedy closed the night. The set is tight, it doesn’t have any breakout moments that exceed and surpass one’s expectations walking in, but it definitely checked all the boxes for a great show, leaving fans happy and smiling.