The Wave Pictures - 'Instant Coffee Baby' (Moshi Moshi) Released 05/05/08

Three-piece The Wave Pictures are a band that have perfected the art of deliciously ramshackle, three chord, lo-fi rock that combines homemade, handcrafted simplicity with intimate snapshots of emotionally cracked commentary. They may arguably lack musical ability (a purely academic argument and one immediately rubbished after listening to the album) but more than make up for it through their witty innocence and formidably executed spontaneity.

Their latest album ‘Instant Coffee Baby’ is outstanding from start to finish and encapsulates their delectably amateur sound which is reassuringly genuine as opposed to being fashionably designed, largely comprising of live takes with a few added overdubs set aside for backing vocals and splashes of added brass and strings. They may have been flying dangerously below the tastemaker radar but The Wave Pictures are on the cusp of a major breakthrough, a step that’s fully justified by the immediately insistent and intriguing album opener ‘Leave The Scene Behind’.

While their instrumentation might be rudimentary, it’s exquisitely appropriate and wraps itself flawlessly around the sublime imagination of David Tattersall’s exotically mundane narrative, which in ‘Kiss Me’ expresses an outrageous disbelief at having his copy of Pet Sounds half-inched, confesses to hating John Lennon’s guts and promises to do better than Sgt. Pepper, while the lyrics of the title track mix and match Simon and Garfunkel with cystitis; no mean feat by anyone’s standards and if you like intelligent wordplay and judge an album by its lyrical content, this is a must have.

There are two consistent musical styles that are displayed throughout the album; an instinctive vein of pressing urgency, one seemingly borne of an internal frustration, manifests itself in the tracks ‘I Love You Like A Madman’, ‘Friday Night In Loughborough’ and ‘Strange Fruit Or David’; and in response, the relatively laidback nostalgia of ‘We Come Alive’, ‘Avocado Baby’, ‘Just Like A Drummer’ and ‘I Remembered’. Add to both of these approaches the adolescent sincerity and intelligence of ‘Red Wine Teeth’ and ‘January And December’ and you’ve got all the trappings of a remarkable band in the making.

‘Instant Coffee Baby’ is a stunningly sharp, magnificently charming effort so far removed from fashionista fop pop, that it’s the must have accessory for summer 2008 and beyond; an unbridled contemporary classic.