AEM083 The Wave Pictures

I dis­cov­ered The Wave Pic­tures when I vol­un­teered to cover, for another illus­tri­ous inter­net pub­li­ca­tion, Brook­lyn Vegan’s pre-SXSW party at the Knit­ting Fac­tory. At first it was pretty much as expected: swarms of overzeal­ous pho­tog­ra­phers, PBR spon­sor­ship, lots of dazed-looking but pretty peo­ple, an open­ing act that was com­pe­tent but for­get­table. Noth­ing to com­plain about, but also noth­ing to really jus­tify all the hul­la­bal­loo. I often have this feel­ing at shows, espe­cially shows where higher-level or hyped bands are play­ing and some­thing of grand sig­nif­i­cance is sup­pos­edly going on. It’s a nat­ural reac­tion, I think, after read­ing so much fawn­ing praise of bands, to see them live or hear a song and think “this is it?” This tends, for me, to lead to lots of abstract and bloated pon­der­ing about whether the world really needs this many god damned rock bands and what the hell we’re all doing stand­ing in this room on a Mon­day night not talk­ing to each other and just sort of wait­ing for some­thing to happen.

Then The Wave Pic­tures came on and I for­got all about that. Instantly. It may sounds like I am set­ting up some sort of self-convincing jour­nal­is­tic hyper­bole in which The Wave Pic­tures are the sav­iors of mod­ern music. I am not. Mod­ern music is just fine. What The Wave Pic­tures are is a really fan­tas­tic live band made up of three men from Lon­don who are tal­ented and instantly lik­able and who pos­sess an amaz­ing abil­ity to make you smile. They also saved me from my own mind and turned my Mon­day night into a really lovely evening. When I said in the other Illus­tri­ous Inter­net Pub­li­ca­tion that I didn’t know when the last time was that I saw so many peo­ple beam­ing at an indie rock show, I was telling the truth. Partly, this was due to front­man David Tattersall’s won­der­fully witty lyrics (take the song, for exam­ple, in which he starts the cho­rus with the lines I hate your mother and I hate your father, cor­rect­ing them on the sec­ond go round to okay, I don’t really hate your mother, but I really hate your father), which come rapid-fire and dis­play his tal­ent for coax­ing seri­ous emo­tion out of details that are mun­dane enough to be com­pletely believ­able. The first song they played at the Knit­ting Fac­tory had me per­plexed at first, with lyrics about two lovers holed up in an apart­ment doing things like melt­ing choco­late on cook­ies and writ­ing their names on banana peels, which sounded incon­se­quen­tial until I heard the line where he dis­cov­ers “how bor­ing we’d become”, which revealed to me that the song was actu­ally about how incon­se­quen­tial those acts are, about the stuffy ennui of a fail­ing relationship.

The band is a trio, com­posed of guitarist/songwriter Tat­ter­sall (who can rip some unbe­liev­able solos live but tends to refrain on record), bassist Franic Rozy­cki and drum­mer Jonny Helm, and their live and recorded asso­ci­a­tion with song­writ­ers like David-Ivar Her­man Düne (of Her­man Düne) and John Darnielle (of The Moun­tain Goats) makes imme­di­ate sense and will help you to place them on the band spec­trum. All three acts are notable for com­plex but direct lyrics deliv­ered over rel­a­tively unadorned pop songs (The Wave Pic­tures strike a rock’n’roll/early punk bal­ance that recalls Jonathan Rich­man), and all three fea­ture singers whose flawed voices suit their songs per­fectly: Darnielle’s nasal­ity makes his vivid sto­ries more dis­arm­ing and affect­ing than a drippy croon would; Düne’s accented Eng­lish only enhances his naïve sin­cer­ity (espe­cially when he sings “bay­beh”) ; and Tattersall’s dryly vibrato’d voice fits his Oscar Wilde witty self-destructiveness perfectly.

A-side “Just Like a Drum­mer”, from the band’s Moshi Moshi debut Instant Cof­fee Baby, is a lovely, lazy pop song, the kind in which The Wave Pic­tures spe­cial­ize, com­plete with strum­ming that’s muted on the back­beats and charm­ingly ama­teur­ish gang vocals that lend the end of the song an air of huge­ness with­out over­whelm­ing the song (the WPs songs are full of this kind of vocals; they sound like a first take of a bunch of friends clus­tered half-drunk around a micro­phone). It’s a per­fect com­pli­ment to the balmy weather we’ve been hav­ing lately, and while the lyrics are sur­pris­ingly inscrutable for a Wave Pic­tures song (they appear to be about liv­ing with a writer) they con­tain some really strik­ing images. The long­ing in the idea of falling for a woman glimpsed not even on the street but on the street in a film car­ries a lot of melan­cholic weight, and the image of the morn­ing sun as a pack of orange spaniels nos­ing and squirm­ing through the room pre­cisely con­veys the irri­ta­tion of being woken up unwill­ingly by the sun.  Also, the rhyth­mic cadence of a line like “the whites, the wine and the weed” is immensely plea­sur­able. The nat­u­ral­ness with which Tat­ter­sall man­ages to toss these things off is almost the most impres­sive part.

B-side “Straw­berry Cables” also man­ages to be intrigu­ingly oblique, meld­ing what appear to be images of a lonely fat kid eat­ing candy in front of the TV (a life­time with­out hips has two poten­tial mean­ings here) with a cho­rus that makes the whole thing sound like a song of lost love. The line the world might hate me but it revolves around me now is one of the lit­tle rev­e­la­tory moments that Tat­ter­sall excels at slip­ping into his songs, encap­su­lat­ing the impulse nearly every aim­less act of teenage vio­lence. What’s most arrest­ing about this song is the melody of the cho­rus, which is full of both melan­choly and deter­mi­na­tion, under­scored by the gen­tle and march­like brush­work and bassline. It sounds as if it ought to gen­tly parade along forever.

Between songs at the live set, the band expressed their utter relief at find­ing them­selves back in civ­i­liza­tion after four days in Florida (this imme­di­ately endeared them to me, Florida being the only state in this lovely coun­try I don’t much care for). They’d played a rock­a­billy bar the night before for about five peo­ple, and a woman had come up to Tat­ter­sall before the show and said, What kind of music do you guys play? Is it coun­try or rock­a­billy? as if those were the only two types of music that existed. They were thrilled to play and we were thrilled to lis­ten, and that’s all you could ask for to ban­ish heavy ques­tions about the mean­ing of live rock shows. And you’re in luck. They’re com­ing to your town soon. You should go give them an audi­ence; they will make your Mon­day night.

Gabe Birn­baum

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