The Wave Pictures (TWP) are the best new band I have heard in ages. I should perhaps point out that I haven’t heard any new bands in ages, but I see lots of R&B on The Hits and they’re much better than those bling-obsessed fools. Just signed to Moshi Moshi, with an album two weeks away from being released, TWP recall the best of anti-folk with the whacked out dizziness of a Sixties garage band.
Quite how new TWP are is debatable — they seem to have been going for years — quietly recording several CD-R albums when the bass player and drummer came up to visit the singer, who was at university in Glasgow. They look young, but somewhat jaded. Don’t know why.
Listening to their myspace, you’d think they were an entirely different band to the one that played the Brel last night. Last night they were fully electric and singer/guitarist Dave Tattersall produced some wonderfully wonky tremolo solos on his cheap fake Strat. Andre from Herman Dune — who has apparently released his own TWP covers albums — accompanied the band with some nonchalant indie noodlings of his own. It was all superbly engaging.
Perhaps the only problem with TWP is that the singer sounds a lot like the chap from Starsailor with the over-enunciated over-English clarity of his voice. Lyrically, they are a world away from the banalities of Starsailor. Take this surreal line from ‘Long Island’:
“I was an auto-focus illuminator flash gun, in aquamarine biology blue,
spitting out prints I printed you on photon quality glossily greasy chip paper with a tortilla dip chaser - and then later, I pinned you down.”
The Wave Pictures are well worth checking out.
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