‘Long Island’ is The Wave Pictures’ best song. Sure, Instant Coffee Baby was good but its oddly-apparently-written-out-of-history predecessor Sophie had LONG FUCKING ISLAND, a magical 3-and-something-minutes stream-of-consciousness stomp through… well, like, “the last swimmers crawled up from the pool, looked at my beautiful belly and drooled” and stuff like that. I think I would go even so far to say that it is one of the best songs written *of all time*, fully aware of the hyperbole but I don’t even care. I mean The Wave Pictures have done some other really good songs but ‘Now You Are Pregnant’ is beautiful and magical yeah but its just ever-(ever-so-slightly) you know, *obviously* beautiful and magical, whereas ‘Long Island’ is waaaayy off-kilter and counter-intutive. And the stuff on ‘Instant Coffee Baby’, a lot of it like the title track and ‘Avocado Baby’ and ‘Cassius Clay’ and such are top-quality songs, but I’m not going to list them with the all-time greats. ‘Long Island’ though, wow… when trawling their back catalogue for good bits of ‘Instant Coffee’ hey, maybe they should have considered that gem. Only thing is the version of ‘Sophie’ is pretty much there already, but they could have slapped it in somewhere for sure.

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No denying there’s a DOUBLE buzz in the air tonight. Of course, everyone’s here to toast 10 years of the noughties’ equivalent of Fierce Panda, Moshi Moshi; forever home to your new favourite band and the super savvy launch pad for mainstream bound acts such as Bloc Party, Lykke Li and tonight’s honorary headliners Hot Chip. But as if that weren’t enough, there’s the not insignificant matter of, um, Matter; the brazenly functional O2 based superclub, designed from the ground up by those clever sorts at Fabric and blessed, purportedly, with the killingest sound system in the world. Though a couple of die-hards TLOBF bumps into at the bar bemoan the distinctly “un-Moshi” setting and its distinctly “un-Indie” bar tax (an astronomical £4 for a measly bottle of lager) there’s no denying it’s a bold setting for a Birthday party and makes for an electrifying atmosphere as London’s indie cognoscenti file in for their first peek at the hyped, paint tin fresh venue. Continue Reading

The internet is sooooo vast that it’s nye on impossible to be aware of all the truly great  music websites out there. Lucky for us then, that the founder of the fairly new Bandstand Busking got in touch a few days ago to tell us all about the video delights they have for the discerning music lover. i.e: You.

So what is Bandstand Busking? Well, it’s kinda like Blackcab Sessions and Takeaway Shows. A ridiculously hip indie band gets asked to perform a few tracks in weird and wonderful locations (in this instance, yup, you guessed it - on bandstands).. There are some fantastic videos up on the site at the moment.. We’ve compiled a few of the best below but we truly recomend you got forth and check the whole lot out. They’re great.

The Wave Pictures - David’s Evening On Wheels

Frightened Rabbit - Backwards Walk

Laura Groves - Coast

The Acorn - The Flood pt 2

The Herman Dune brothers have announced a new album. To be called Next Year In Zion, songwriter and vocalist David-Ivar Herman Dune and drummer Neman Herman Dune have conjured up a dozen new songs for our delight.

Herman Dune habr expand the core duo to include their extended family of female backing vocalists The Babyskins, The John Natchez Bourbon Horn players (on loan from Beirut and Arcade Fire) and guitar virtuoso Dave Tattersall, (from TLOBF-faves The Wave Pictures).

“I’ve always loved knowing how records I love were made, I love watching footage of The Beatles recording, seeing pictures of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed or The Doors in a studio. I’ve always gathered facts about how Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich, Carole King and Shadow Morton got those songs to sound that good. I went to visit Motown in Detroit, and used to carry a picture of Sam Phillips in my textbook when I was a kid. Trying producing records myself is like trying all those toys and tools I’ve seen in pictures. It’s a lot of fun….”

Marvellous… more details when we get them folks!

Moshi Moshi Records are to undertake the low carbon release of the next EP from The Wave Pictures, available for digital download only on 6th October.

Recording – scheduled for 28th August – will take place in a solar powered studio at ‘The Premises’ in London. The band will walk to the studio - as will the engineer - and at the end of the day’s recording the studio will upload the tracks to the server of their digital distributor, for release through iTunes and other digital download stores.

No CDR’s or paper press releases will be generated. The process will even be filmed on solar-powered camera.

Moshi Moshi co-founder Michael McClatchey explains, “We thought it would be a useful experiment to see what we could do to reduce the carbon emissions associated with releasing a record. The initial aim was to make it carbon-neutral but it soon became apparent this would be impossible given the power needed to run the servers for delivering the tracks in to itunes. Nevertheless I believe this should still be the ‘greenest’ record release yet.

“When I mentioned the idea to The Wave Pictures they asked if they could be the ones to do it, and suggested they could walk to the studio from their house.”

Moshi Moshi consulted the environmental working group Julie’s Bicycle on the process. Julie’s Bicycle is a not for profit organisation, with a core aim to identify and champion activities across the music industry that will lead to the development of a low carbon industry.

Alison Tickell, Director of Julie’s Bicycle: “We are really pleased that Moshi Moshi is taking these positive steps towards reducing the carbon impact of their latest release. Their studio of choice is solar powered, they are reducing the impact of their travel and have taken account of the recommendations of our First Step report into the UK Music Industry Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, 2008). It’s this kind of intelligent response to the issue that is going to ultimately catalyze the changes to a low carbon music business that we all need so badly.”

Details on specific tracks for the EP release will be announced shortly.

Same venue, different night. The Wave Pictures.

It was with a possibly quite unnatural level of excitement that I headed up to London last Wednesday to The Borderline for a BBC 6Music “Club Fandango” night, featuring The Wave Pictures.

Arriving very early (geekish eagerness, much?) brought the advantage of allowing us to bag the ideal viewing location - as any of you familiar with The Borderline will know, one of those high stools in front of the little table just to the left of the stage: bonus! Continue Reading

Earlier this year, The Wave Pictures released the utterly fantastic Instant Coffee Baby, TLOBF’s official Album Of The Year Thus Far, and although that’s probably on some level a compromise between the more-passionately loved (or not loved) Fleet Foxes and Johnny Foreigner, its still got some pretty incredible songs on. Witty, ramshackle, vague air of drunkenness, inadequacy and lust… yeah, The Wave Pictures do the whole Literate British Indie-Rock thing to its finest degree.

So this new EP is pretty cool. Basically I guess just five offcuts backing ‘Just Like A Drummer’, an odd choice for a single because its arguably the closest thing the album has to a weak track but STILL, in terms of extra-to-album EPs its not quite ‘Fluorescent Grey’ but what it is is five solid slices of pure Wave Pictures, again relative to the rest of their canon definable in terms of what they’re *not*- they’re not ‘Now You Are Pregnant’, ‘We Dress Up Like Snowmen’, ‘Long Island’, ‘Strange Fruit For David’, etc etc but yeah they’re good.

Essentially what this EP offers is More Wave Pictures, and that’s a really good thing. For the uninitiated, its nowhere near as good an introduction as the album, and for the haters (honestly though, how could you? Is something wrong with you?) its not going to make you change your mind. For the rest of us though, just stick on ‘Dust Off Your Heart’ and smile. :)
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Links
The Wave Pictures [official site] [myspace] [album review] [best of 2008... so far]

If we’re to quote The Cranberries (and why shouldn’t you?), “Everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we?”. As we’ve past the halfway point in this year of 2008, it seemed like a good time to look back. What have been the musical higlights of the year so far? We’ve had some absolutely corking albums released, from Fleet Foxes genre defying debut, to Elbow’s continued cultured and heartwarming release. It might surprise some of our readers what’s ended up on this list but one thing this exercise has made us realise, is that come the end of the year, there’s going to be a big pile of albums under the ‘Excellent’ heading…

So how did we decide on the final 10 albums? We asked all of our writers to email in their favourite 5 releases of the year thus far. Each album voted for was then given a point and entered into a highly technical spreadsheet - which left us with the following records… Continue Reading

So it’s one of THE great debuts by a British band, we’ve established that. But what do The Wave Pictures themselves think of the album? Dave Tattersall (lead singer, guitarist) sat down and wrote at length his thoughts on the classic that is Instant Coffee Baby .

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One of the great things about doing reviews for The Line of Best Fit is getting to hear music by bands that otherwise would almost definitely have passed underneath one’s musical radar. This great little album is a prime example. The Wave Pictures have seemingly been touring and self-releasing for five or so years, but until now I had not heard or read anything about them. Hopefully this release will get them the publicity and increase in acclaim that they deserve.

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This April and May on of TLOBF’s favourite new bands, The Wave Pictures, will be playing shows in support of their debut album for Moshi Moshi. Instant Coffee Baby will be released, finally, on May 5th and can be pre ordered from the Moshi Moshi shop. The album includes recent single ‘I Love You Like A Madman’ as well as forthcoming single ‘Strange Fruit For David’, out April 28th on glorious 7”.

The band have also been nominated for an Indy Award thanks to the promoters at End of The Road Festival. To access more details about the awards and vote for The Wave Pictures, please click the following link:

http://www.indyawards.co.uk/2008/artist_voting.php?artists=The%20Wave

Here are those Instant Coffee Baby tour dates in full:

March
28th ‘Tapestry presents’ @ Aloyius Church, NW1, London
30th London Luminaire supporting Darren Hayman
31st The Enterprise, Camden supporting Slow Club

April
7th ‘90 Free cds’ @ 93 Feet East, London
20th Edinburgh Cabaret Voltaire
21st Aberdeen Tunnels
22nd Glasgow Brel
24th London Luminaire
26th Leeds Faversham
28th Nottingham Bodega (formerly The Social)

May
3rd Manchester Night and Day
4th Coventry Taylor John’s House
8th Bristol Thekla
10th Cardiff Clwb Ifor Bach