The Wombats’ debut album The Wombats Proudly Present… A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation is officially 10 years old this year. It’s the record that propelled the English indie rockers into the public consciousness, introducing The Wombats as a powerfully influential band that would help to soundtrack the angsty teenage years of youths worldwide, and even after a decade it remains one of the most influential albums of my life to date.
While I remember hearing various songs from the record in 2007 on the radio, it was only a bit over a year later when a few mates from school decided to put a rock band together that I again listened to the album as a whole and began to understand how important it was. At the age of 14 or 15, three mates and myself gathered in a mate’s garage and began to work on some of the chords to a variety of tracks by Bloc Party and The Wombats, and so necessarily to learn the bass parts I downloaded A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation on my iPod Nano and listened to it religiously.
That band, while ultimately never making it out of that garage (personally I blame our inability to settle on a name), left me with a burning desire to continue to explore the capacity for music to influence emotion and make myself and others feel better. The music on A Guide To Love, Loss & Depression resonated with my own experiences in a way that few records before it could. It was both a reflection on the struggles of being young and full of poignant pop culture references, and would pave the way for my development into an annoying little bugger who needed all of my friends to hear everything I discovered as soon as I had decided that it was good.
Fast forward to 2010 and my final year of high school, and by some twist of fate I’ve remained close with my Wombat-loving friends. House parties featuring a spattering of goon and, in retrospect, some pretty questionable homebrewed beers were starting to take place among groups of friends and acquaintances. It was around this time that The Wombats’ debut record rebounded into my life courtesy of drunken singalongs at the back end of nights littered with questionable choices.
For whatever reason, we’d often found ourselves signing along to tracks with particularly catchy hooks like Moving To New York and Kill The Director, but there was one song that was a clear standout; Let’s Dance To Joy Division. Once someone hijacked the music and put this song on, everyone knew it was time to stop what they were doing and join in the singalong, and in one beautiful moment social status, power plays, grudges and loneliness ceased to exist. Sure, everything was going wrong, but in those moments it didn’t matter because we were so happy.
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While the album as a whole presents the overarching angst, loneliness and struggles of being a teenager and early experiences with love, there are also some very specific lyrics that have stuck with me. You know, the sort of lyrics that you sing just a little bit louder when the song comes on at a party, but so does everyone else so it’s okay. School Uniforms offers some intensely relatable perspectives of a young man growing up like ‘You grew tall, I stayed the same. I guess that’s just puberty’, and of course the unforgettable ‘Here’s another song about a gender I’ll never understand’ from Kill The Director.
These lyrics reflect experiences that most young people can understand or have witness their friends experience, even if they aren’t immediately relatable. The importance of having an outlet to express such feelings about aspects of growing up that are explicitly difficult to talk about to your mates or parents can’t be understated. Whether it was listening to these lyrics on my iPod on the way to school, or singing them in my band’s garage, or belting them out at a party; The Wombats crafted an album that allowed myself and many others to truly believe that ultimately we weren’t alone.
Reflecting back on A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation a decade later, it still contains everything that an successful album should have. It’s full of hugely memorable, nostalgia-evoking singles that even whilst I sit here and listen I can’t help but begin to lip-sync, and at the same time it makes complete sense as a collection of 13 tracks that explore and reflect the intricacies of its common theme. When songs like Kill The Director, Lost In The Post, Patricia The Stripper and Joy Division come on at parties I’ll still belt them out and while the lyrics are no longer as poignant for me at this stage of my life, each of these songs reminds me of the struggles of the latter years of high school and first years of university. They probably always will.
- Words by Zanda Wilson who tweets here.
