The Wave Pictures - If You Leave It Alone

Nine releases in and still the bass is too bassy, the drums are too distant, etc. But by The Wave Pictures philosophy, if you leave it alone, authentic audio beats compressed audio and the songs are enhanced. They’re right, you know. In this day and age where one artist after the other is competing to find the sound of the future, recording their debut album at Abbey Road, double-taking vocals, auto-tuning, Wymeswold’s very own sit pretty in their corner, getting on with what they do best and producing what nowadays is refreshing in terms of recording techniques.

It’s a brave move to commence an album with a track that sounds so blatantly out of place as an opener. The conventional function of an album opener is to lunge into the thick of the action, to invite you into a lengthy passage of enjoyment. Here, however, the title-track on ‘If You Leave It Alone’ waltzes in with you, arm in arm, confident that you’ll stay for another glass. Again, the rule book is thrown into the fire, with Dave Tattersall’s lyrical content focusing on food pleasures, ‘I wrote my name on a banana peel / There should always be a meal with my name on it’ is just one of many an example. Musically, the rest of the band stay rooted to the spot in conjunction, sticking true to a 50s live band sound - spirited, confident, entertaining, all that’s required is a double bass.

‘The world might hate me but it revolves around me now’. Tattersall’s lyrics are what truly makes the record, swimming in and out of witty anecdotes to passionate declarations of affection, as usual. It takes a brave / stupid human being to fail to take notice of his contribution. He merges from the album an arrogant man, yet completely aware of his inefficiencies - very reminiscent to the band, this album as a whole.

The one-take recordings expose all to potential slip-ups, such as Tattersall’s slight choke in ‘Nothing Can Change This Love’ or the slightly flat backing vocals in ‘Canary Wharf’. But you’re likely to warm to it as easy as you would for the album’s predecessor which carried an equally care-free attitude on its shoulder. This rare charm is almost incomparable to the majority of modern day acts: Bloc Party, never one to warm to the smooth acoustic sound in this record anyway, still managed to hire two producers to help compress every vocal, every drum pattern into something inhuman on ‘Intimacy’, and even the bulk of the crop of American lo-fi acts are far more immersed in their own style and image than their musical output. This makes The Wave Pictures something to behold. The latest effort packs less punch than ‘Instant Coffee Baby’ and at times wanders into uncomfortable territory, but it always manages to produce a sing-a-long or a dozen.