Sever your relationship with the real world. To endure all the consequences of day-to-day activities is often a horror and the worst part of all are artists who can find joy in it. This may be an overestimation of those in the bubble of indie synthpop, but its booming positivity is hard to avoid as it relies on every day, broad experiences as a cornerstone of its relatable moments. Life is a Killer would have us for fools if we did not all have those experiences of turmoil and strife. Where Love Fame Tragedy gets it right is in assessing how we live – but it is in this sporadically relatable album where the wheels come off and the efforts of The Wombats frontman Matthew Murphy fall apart. Apps and relationships under the scope of modernity without so much as a flicker of new thoughts or emotions to feed on. We live life in fear of new experiences, as does Love Fame Tragedy on their second album.
Life is a Killer immediately positions itself as an album for kooky chancers who never grew up from flannel shirts and jam jar glasses. Don’t You Want to Sleep with Someone Normal? takes an expressionless opener and churns out everyday experiences as spectacular triumphs. Blacking out on a night out and hoping for formality in the era of situationships is nothing new. It may be the terms set out by Love Fame Tragedy but as they linger in the doorway of soft pop, they lose whatever uniqueness their lyrical aspirations could feel for. Life may be a killer, but the silence of uncertainty is better received than the disconnected rush of trying to feel through life as a shallow prospect. It’s OK to Be Shallow had better be ironic. Shallow and cheap assumptions are bold to make on an album which expresses much of the same energy. This is no fault of Murphy, whose solo work sounds fairly in line with the work he has provided The Wombats for the last decade.
His expansion into solo work was not inevitable but now it is here it feels lifeless. Early night club filler. There is no discernible personality to this one. Murphy has failed to land a lifestyle we can either subscribe to or sulk off in shock at. His middle ground is our burden to suffer through. Melancholic tones are taken up for they are popular, not because The Wombats’ leading man has anything to add. Twee songs must have some layer of emotional depth buried within, surely? My Head’s In A Hurricane is cut from the same cloth as all those other middle-aged, once-indie artists promising to take a hammer to the world and mould it in their image. It does not work like this and for all the good intentions Love Fame Tragedy may have with these surface-level interests, their lack of depth stunts their growth into blossoming, intense pieces of emotional clarity.
Break away from the dense and tiresome fourth wall breaks of an instrumental with a voice note peppered over the top. Self-referential as all those wannabe thespians are when they take a plunge into the shallow pool of frontmen turned solo artists, Murphy and his Life is a Killer project find a fatal, redundant end. Withered experiences which are open and broad enough to slide your personality into place. Lock it in and ride the wave of light synth workings and the very vague notions of a man in touch with the world around him. Primitive repetitions on Ain’t No Need to Try highlight the real trouble of Life is a Killer. Each track the same story told over as Murphy looks for the one which works. From the Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat mantra of Eat, Fuck, Sleep, Forever to the open-ended Maybe I Should? All of it feels like an all-too-safe trap to capture passive listeners. There is a lack of heart to this which is usually reserved for artists on the decline.
