The Wave Pictures – Sweetheart EP

The Wave Pictures - Sweetheart EP

“When the sheet slides from your chest / It helps to have a reason when you’re fondling the breasts / of the wife of the guy with the knife across you neck.” Peddling the kind of guitar/bass/drum straight-ahead indie that you’ve probably been listening too for a very long time, The Wave Pictures need something to stand out in this most crowded of crowds. Where a lot of ‘guitar music’ has homogenous and anonymous lyrics, The Wave Pictures revel in specifics and story telling: the words tell a story and the stories are always worth listening to.

Don’t expect any great narratives here though; the stories the lyrics tell are mostly of the ‘slice of life’ genre. In fact, ‘Cinnamon Baby’ mostly revolves around a young lady picking her teeth clean ‘with the nails of her left hand’. Dan Brown it is not. But then is that such a bad thing? As a lyricist David Tattersall is probably the closest that England has come to producing John Darnielle, he of Mountain Goats fame who sets the standard for story-telling in modern indie music.

Lyrics don’t mean a thing though if you haven’t got the music to propel them through the speakers. The enjoyment you’ll get from Sweetheart EP will to a large part be dependent on your tolerance for sloppiness in music. Wave Pictures’ fans will know exactly what to expect from these six new songs: Tattersall’s impassioned, slightly off kilter croon and manic guitar lines scrawled over a tight, if basic, rhythm section. There are no radical departures from the norm here although the EP format seems to have given them the licence to cut loose more than on their previous long players. Two of the songs end in long guitar freakout solos that sound like Thurston Moore probably would if you confiscated all his pedals and made him live on his wits.

There is an endearing sloppiness to the music throughout: a slightly ragged feel to the backing vocals, a casually placed guitar strum in the bridge; it feels loose and relaxed. Only repeated listens reveal the fact that each of these laid back flourishes is carefully and cunningly placed in exactly the right place for maximum effect. The strength of this record is in how carefully and precisely structured both words and music are; and in how well they have disguised this and made it sound spontaneous and unstructured.

Should you check out this record? If you’ve enjoyed previous Wave Pictures records then definitely, yes. If you like the idea of a love-lorn sounding vocalist singing about how ‘we play in a dust cloud, like Pig-Pen from Peanuts’ then definitely, yes. If you like your records to sound precision engineered, with all rough edges sanded away then… probably not.

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