Music

No matter how much studio trickery is employed these days, the difference between a turd and a diamond is still glaringly obvious, something that The Wave Pictures’ (official) debut proves – nay, shows off – in spades. Making use of no more than a battered eight-track (plus a little bit of dubbing, they say), the trio have laid down 13 gems that say: If you’ve got it, don’t dress it up. The Wave Pictures’ naked, bookish pop songs, which they’ve been bashing out since ’98, exude their own special kind of screw-you confidence the most musclebound rock would find it hard to compete with. The ease with which they expose themselves, bad postures and all, through their tough, tender and raggedly ambitious rock ’n’ roll (as on the title track), is too charming, true and heartfelt not to fall in love with, just like early Talking Heads, Herman Düne (one of whom guests here), Felt and – with frontman David Tattersall’s lyrical wizardry – Jonathan Richman.

That’s something a NASA-like mixing desk will never conjure – a devastating line that stops you in your tracks, such as ‘He made the pages of the Leicester Mercury, “Get it out for the lads, get it up for the British, get it off for the town, let it down for the village.” ’ Whether or not Tattersall ‘makes up all these stories’ of infatuation, failing love and silly arguments (as he claims on ‘We Come Alive’), at their helm The Wave Pictures have a writer who captures expertly the bitter romance of British life. So special is he that Nick Lowe said of Tattersall recently that he’s likely to ‘plough a righteous but lonely furrow’. Not too lonely, we say. The Pictures’ home-baked, home-truth pop is too swoonsome for that. Chris Parkin