To make music, you have to love music. It’s a good job, then, that Wymeswold-originating cult indie trio the Wave Pictures are absolutely enamoured with the stuff, having spent their early days obsessively taping John Peel’s radio shows and playing cover versions of their favourite songs. Even now, their sound is often compared to the NME’s legendary C86 tape – all intricately melodic guitar work delivered with scruffy enthusiasm.
But just as their idol Jonathan Richman sang about being ‘in love with the modern world’ with the conviction of someone dictating a manifesto, the Wave Pictures’ interests don’t stop at music alone. Their latest album, Gained / Lost, is no second-hand pastiche of their favourite hits but a movingly personal celebration of art, literature, and life.
The striking lyrical images and climbing, leaping, wailing guitar of opening track ‘Alice’, influenced by the William Burroughs novel My Education: A Book Of Dreams, prove right off the bat that the Wave Pictures would rather stay attuned to everything around them than retreat into the things they know. ‘There’s a multicoloured joy to the music,’ say the band, ‘and a black and white strangeness to the lyrics’.
In his distinctive naïve-art bawl, lead singer David Tattersall casts himself simultaneously as a weary old hand and an innocent. The band comment that ‘in painting you can be everywhere at once: in a dream, in a memory, in the past and the future’, and ‘Alice’ sees Tattersall both observing ‘I’ve been raised up by abuse, I’ve been brought low by praise’ in the manner of a kindly teacher advising a pupil, and yearning ‘someone told me there’d be ice cream / Ice cream for everyone’ with a child’s plaintive laser-focus.
‘Sure & Steady’ is built along similarly hopeful lines, Tattersall recalling a childhood memory as the music scatters droplets of light and freshness like a rushing brook. Once the scene is set, a guitar solo begins with such delicacy it at first seems to be coming out of a flute and gradually builds to an unrestrained spring-lamb frolic. It speaks to one of Tattersall’s greatest strengths as a guitarist; he never treats his solos as throwaway garnishes or excuses to show off, understanding perfectly that their role is to fill the emotional spaces left when the words have done everything they can.
This is also the case on the charming, upbeat title track. Despite the song’s shining sense of optimism, it’s careful not to neglect the confusion and loss which so often attend the end of a relationship. ‘I was born to lose you,’ Tattersall laments, although as if through a smile. As soon as he has come to terms with what it means to move on, he lets loose a fireworks display of squalling rock while the piano, bass, and drums behind him grow and grow in force and freedom. It feels every bit as cathartic as acceptance should.
‘Orange Fire’ is just as graceful, capturing exactly how it feels to be right beside a person and miles away from them in the same moment. ‘The spiders come out and glide down the walls / We too are held up by invisible thread.’
But if all this comes off as a little too sentimental for your tastes, fear not. ‘You’re My Patient Now’ swaggers along by way of a moody rock and roll bassline in the ‘Louie Louie’ tradition, and the urgent ‘Samuel’ suggests that if the Wave Pictures had wanted to play the game, they could have won all the NME Awards they wanted. It barrels forth like a Western movie set in British suburbia, a maelstrom of desperately flurrying fiddle going off like a bar fight as Tattersall piles image after panicked image on top of one another in a brashly nervous Alex Turner gulp.
And the music doesn’t always reflect the weepy ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ melancholy the lyrics might suggest. ‘I remember the sweet soft cake your soft-skinned grandma used to make’ isn’t the sort of opening line you’d imagine Lou Reed, Patti Smith, or early Nick Cave sneering, but on ‘The Past Comes Back to Haunt Me’ Tattersall’s delivery carries traces of all three, over a backing which creeps and crawls like a paranoid ‘Peter Gunn’. Even photo-album nostalgia can carry a switchblade up its sleeve.
This fixation on memory also helps to give the Wave Pictures their remarkable talent for image-making. Like so many great pop songwriters, the band understand how emotion can render both a person and the world they inhabit in high definition, and this thought finds its most sophisticated musical setting on ‘Sparklers’. With its shuffling percussion and steel guitar, you can almost smell the sea air of the beach and feel the warmth of the sparkler in your hand.
While the Wave Pictures’ discography is peppered with references from Dion and the Belmonts to Roosevelt Sykes, on Gained / Lost they only make mention of one band – themselves. In lesser hands, ‘Faded Wave Pictures T-Shirt’ may have come across as egomaniacal, but when the vocal harmonies lilt the title over a thumbprint bassline and tinkling piano, its poignancy becomes clear. The chorus is a richly drawn portrait of a loved one, and to be loved for your music, it suggests, is to be loved for your soul.
It’s this deeply felt sense of affection, of contentment, and ultimately of closure which provides the album with the perfect note to end on. Supported by shimmers of mandolin, the twanged guitar of ‘Worry Anymore’ goes straight to the heart. ‘In dreams begin responsibilities,’ sings Tattersall, ‘every season has its course’. It seems even indie kids have to grow up in the end, and ‘Worry Anymore’ proves that it’s possible – imperative, even – to embrace subtlety, maturity, and most importantly happiness without moving to the middle of the road.
Eighteen years have passed since the Wave Pictures broke through with the album Instant Coffee Baby, and twenty-eight since they first formed. Though comfortingly still the same band they’ve always been (why change when you were this open to the world to start with?) they never give in to the broad strokes of do-you-remember public nostalgia. Tattersall, Rozycki, and Helm know that the quiet, personal moments are the ones which last, and all the way through Gained / Lost, their songs illuminate this wisdom beautifully. Put on your faded Wave Pictures T-shirt and press play. It’s all too easy to forget that music can feel like this.
Gained / Lost is out Friday 27th February via Bella Union – order here
The Wave Pictures are currently on tour:
27th February – Glasgow – Stereo
28th February – Nottingham – Old Cold Store
1st March – Oxford – Jericho Tavern
3rd March – Bristol – Strange Brew
4th March – Cardiff – Clwb Ifor Bach
5th March – Manchester – YES
6th March – Brighton – Dust
The Wave Pictures socials:
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp
Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography courtesy of the artist
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