The Wombats

The kangaroo attacks by holding its opponent with its short arms and disembowelling them using its powerful hind legs and viciously sharp toe nails. The giant panda will maul and eat anyone endangering its young. Starving dolphins in the North Sea have recently begun biting humans due to the depletion of the cod supplies. Yet, despite almost all of the cuddliest animals eventually revealing a psychopathic tendency, there has yet to be one recorded incident of a human fatality caused by a wombat. The furry lickle fellas really do deserve to share with Kate Nash their reputation as the least dangerous creature on Earth.
Until now. Because for all their primary coloured scouser sweetness, a capella theme tunes and fluffy band mascots, Liverpool perk popsters The Wombats have a merciless lyrical bite. Their Cribs-ish twangles disguise wells of bile that’d have the average pre-bout wrestler suggesting they pop a Xanax and chill out, maaaan.
So ‘Let’s Dance To Joy Division’ is an anomaly in their canon. Slapping on some Franz funky bass, a child’s choir and a surprise ’80s disco interlude halfway through, ver ’Bats point and chuckle at the idea of dancing to something as bleak and suicide-inducing as a Joy Division record. “Let’s dance to Joy Division/And celebrate the irony/Everything is going wrong/But we’re so happy” yelps Murph jubilantly and, ironically, he thereby concocts his finest dancefloor stormer yet. It’s a song so full of the joys, subtleties and possibilities of pop that it makes the very concept of dancing to a Joy Division song ever again utterly ludicrous. Expect it to fill indie club dancefloors after a wink-wink spin of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ the nation over.

A cuddly killer.