The Wave Pictures

Lyrically, The Wave Pictures turn on a dime. They can zip from richly observed into amusingly confessional into a Lewis Carroll flight of fancy, as on ‘Strange Fruit For David’, which has a Morrissey-like knack for landmining the sublime: “A statue is a statue, and marmalade is marmalade/But a statue of marmalade is still a statue”. Musically, they could probably turn on a dime too (in the other sense of the word…) such is their woozy, small-town romanticism. With a recklessness that makes Let’s Wrestle seem like Radiohead, they bash from The Crickets (‘We Come Alive’) to the Smokey Robinson treacle soul of ‘Avocado Baby’. Having made this dishevelled bed they invite David Tattersall’s voice to lie down on it, but to no avail. Buttered with reverb to the point of distortion, his nasal Brett Anderson rasp leaps up and bites you in the pants region. Excitingly.

Gavin Haynes