The Wave Pictures - If You Leave It Alone (Moshi Moshi)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Like many of my closest friends, this album was an accident. The story goes thusly - the Wave Pictures were in France, playing on a friend's record. Whilst there, they used down-time in his studio to record some acoustic demos of songs that may or may not form the follow up to their fantastic Instant Coffee Baby LP of 2008. And then they left them there.
Finding them strewn about his studio, said friend of theirs became quite enamoured with these discarded demos. He put some quite wonderful brass parts on them, and lent them some backing vocalists. Mixed it. Mastered it. Then gave it back to the Wave Pictures upon completion. There it was, their new album - and they didn't even know they'd made one!
All of which points towards it being an under-considered, messy, lo-fi affair. Which... wait for it... it is. But The Wave Pictures' charm is in their slackness. When they sound like they're trying, they sound bored. When they sound like they're winging it, they sound quite, quite gorgeous.
It is and it isn't a radical departure for the trio. The title track could have fit on their breakthrough preceding record Instant Coffee Baby as a heartbreaking, cute, acoustic interlude. More of that brilliant same is what's in store, you think to yourself. But curiously given their past efforts, they stay acoustically bound the whole way through - none of the thrillingly daft guitar solos they're famed for appear anywhere on If You Leave it Alone. Though never the world's most complex outfit, over egging the pudding is avoided here with more diligence than ever before.
The laughably uncomplicated yet still effortlessly classy 'Tiny Craters In The Sand' proves to their contemporaries that there are still very rewarding things to be done with conventional song structure, if that thing that you choose to do with it is delivered in the correct, sympathetic, intriguing manner. 'Canary Wharf', too, could be described as haunting, if it weren't so simplistic - it's difficult to be scared by something you understand entirely, as any ghost will tell you. Yet this doesn't take away from its naive power.
Elsewhere, they're more interested in making us smile than ponder. 'My Kiss' might be one of the more raucous, celebratory sing-alongs they've every written, yet it and 'Bumble Bee' (especially 'Bumble Bee') are essentially very hastily assembled nursery rhymes recorded by an unapologetic lo-fi indie band. But what was that point I made about their slackness being their trump card? Yeah, that point still stands.
After the slight, fleeting nature of so much of it, 'Come On Daniel' comes across as so gorgeous that it's as if they might have had a go at actually sitting down and writing the thing, scrunching up lyrics on A4 paper and throwing them over their shoulder in the direction of a bin they'll never land in, working all through the night to find the perfect melody. Not their style of labour, but a lovely, lovely song. They way it's followed with the equally considered 'I Thought of You Again' suggests that If You Leave It Alone might have sections which are deliberately mapped out as aiming at greatness, but it's not an idea I want to entertain much - an off the cuff nature of occasional, inexplicable, scattergun brilliance is far more becoming and, I'd wager, accurate.
And it's not a masterpiece, not by any means. In terms of pace and dynamic, it's much of a muchness. In terms of feel, it's either lovely, or mood-alteringly sad - but never angry, desperate, vital. Never any of the really exciting stuff. Its final third is pretty easy to ignore, even when you're actually listening to it. But to ask such a record to be anything other than it is seems to me to be missing the point of its existence - an existence which it nearly didn't even have, at least not in this form. It is what it is, and what it is beats what it isn't, quite conclusively.
Effortless pretty much sums The Wave Pictures up - each one of these songs , for all their quirks and readily noticeable blemishes, will become what some couple somewhere will refer to as "our song". And when they get to meet The Wave Pictures after some show in a tiny pub somewhere and tell them of the fact, The Wave Pictures will look utterly bewildered. It wasn't what they planned. They planned nothing. They don't even think they're that great a band.
Oh, and their next album, also released this year, will be a Bruce Springsteen covers collection that probably took them about an hour to record. We cross our fingers in the hope of it being a skeleton of comparable beauty to this one.
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