1. Blue Harbour
2. Now Your Smile Comes Over In Your Voice
3. Little Surprise
4. Blink Back A Tear
5. Walk The Back Stairs Quiet
6. China
7. Pale Thin Lips
8. In Her Kitchen
9. Two Lemons, One Lime
10. Beer In The Breakers
11. Rain Down
12. Epping Forest
All songs written by David Tattersall
David Tattersall: Guitar, lead vocals and harmonica on ‘Rain Down’
Franic Rozycki: Bass guitar and backing vocals
Jonny Helm: Drums and backing vocals
Recorded on the 13th and 14th of October 2010
Produced by Darren Hayman
Cover image by Nina Garthwaite
Released on Moshi Moshi Records on May 2nd 2011
Catalogue number: moshicd39
Bonus CD (with Record Store Day copies, released April 16th 2011)
1. Apple Boy
2. Here The Ferries Mooring
3. I Walked Past Them Sleeping
4. One More For The Road, Marianne
5. Underneath The Willow
6. The Worm Inside The Brain
Dave Tattersall’s track by track breakdown of the album
Named after Franic Rozycki’s favourite brand of clothing, this song describes a trip to Coney Island , New York
NOW YOUR SMILE COMES OVER IN YOUR VOICE
This is my idea of a quintessential Wave Pictures song in E minor. When I wrote the lyrics I was thinking about a very dear friend of mine, and the way a person lights up when they tell a funny story from the past. Franic Rozycki’s bassline really makes the song, made even better because he pulled it out of thin blue air for this take. I’d rather hear some mistakes and improvisation on a record, just to make it sound lively. Too many bands sound completely dead to me, in a polished way. We wanted to do something in the exact opposite way from all those modern records we don’t like were made.
LITTLE SURPRISE
I wrote these lyrics in a bar in Munich
BLINK BACK A TEAR
This Stanley Brinks’ favourite Wave Pictures song, and one of my favourite too. It is a minor key blues song in the style of Otis Rush, whose “Original Cobra Recordings” is one of The Wave Pictures’ all time favourite albums.
WALK THE BACK STAIRS QUIET
In this song a girlfriend urges her boyfriend to sneak out of the house when she hears her insomniac parents beginning to argue in the kitchen downstairs. This is without question my personal favourite recording on the album. It was originally recorded with our acoustic side-project Dan of Green Gables, but The Wave Pictures version is quite different.
This is a very old song, reprised here at the behest of Jonny Helm, as a kind of public gift to our good friend Hugh Noble, who used to play drums in The Wave Picture, and remains a massive influence on us. At the end of song, when the whole band chants “give me back my China Whale Brand”, The Wave Pictures manage to somehow sound a bit like The Fall.
PALE THIN LIPS
Like ‘Little Surprise’ this one was written in German, and contains reference to some places there. It has nice soul-y chords and pretty thrilling guitar solo. We were very keen to put more solos on this album than on previous albums. Ever since the band started playing live in London
IN HER KITCHEN
This is the album’s other old song. When you hear Beer In The Breakers, you get to hear me covering myself when I was 17, that’s how old I was when I wrote In Her Kitchen.
TWO LEMONS, ONE LIME
I play an acoustic guitar instead of an electric guitar on this song. There’s something very melancholy about this one. It’s set in a bar in Aberystwyth on a rainy day.
BEER IN THE BREAKERS
This is the title track of our album because it seemed to represent what we were trying to do the most clearly. It’s dark and slow, and again a quintessential type of Wave Pictures song. I love the story in this song, it’s happened to me but I don’t remember where. I found a small camp that someone had set up on a very grim stretch of beach. There were beer cans and a long-gone-out fire. It didn’t feel like anyone would have a party there, it felt like a very lonely soul had somehow ended up in that situation alone for a few nights. The feeling always stuck with me, and this song, like many of our songs, is a kind of hazy-memory song. It is, of course, in E minor.
RAIN DOWN
A Velvet Underground-y chugging two chord song, every album should have one. Especially Lou Reed albums. He doesn’t always remember to do it. I don’t know why. He invented it, after all.
This song is a kind of companion song to “I Saw Your Hair Between The Tress”, a song which was on both “Dan of Green Gables” and my solo album “Happy For A While”. Epping Forest fills out a story that started there.
And so we come to Beer In The Breakers, the current album, the 3rd "proper", the 4th by my count and possibly the 9th by the band's reckoning. Much has been made of the recording of this record - done in Darren Hayman's front room over the course of 2 days, live-takes mostly recorded on the first day. Some people like to call this approach "lo-fi" and Hayman, understandably, bristles at this assertion. He has good recording equipment, the songs sound great and warm, the performances (the WP's are nothing if not well-drilled) are excellent. THIS IS NOT LO-FI! Vampire On Titus by Guided By Voices is lo-fi, Beer In The Breakers isn't. Journalists seem to confuse lo-fi with "sparse", and even then I doubt they would have even noticed if the details of the recording session hadn't been made public. The industry of music has brainwashed the taste-makers in many ways so as to corrupt the previously held "norm's" of being a recording artist - i.e. playing the songs live, being a working band, not being considered a freak and a liability if you manage to write an album every year - and this sneery attitude to records which are "knocked out" is an extension of that. I love my copy of Pet Sounds as much as the next man, but as well as loving the WP's songs I find this side of the band equally attractive. The fact they want to "capture" something is in my mind a loftier goal than that displayed by most of their peers.
ReplyDeleteSo it’s a sparse record. If you aren't recording overdub's then that's the way it has got to be unless you conscript a number of helpers into the mix. It's interesting to me whether they chose these songs due to the nature of the recording. There is an undoubted autumnal feel to the songs, a mood which matches the material with many slow songs. If the beach in Blue Harbour is bathed in sunshine the one in the title track certainly isn't. Anyone who thinks my reviews border on sycofantsy may be surprised to read I actually think the album goes too far in this direction. Walk The Back Stairs Quiet and the title track are excellent but I find Epping Forest one slow song too many and the balance of the record gets a bit skewed as a result. This is particularly eggregious as it's the last song and comes after Rain Down, one of their finest moments to date and a real toe-tapper - the album could quite easily have stopped there, or as the bonus cd shows, Epping Forest could have been replaced as there are always other songs in their ammunition ready to be fired off. Instead it seems to go out in a whimper rather than a bang.
In the light of this I think the record, song-wise, is a little notch below Susan Rode The Cyclone and is slightly less enjoyable as a result. However, it excels in a way none of their previous records can match - by pointing towards new pastures. I get a real sense of the band's sound expanding on this one. Two Lemons, One Lime has a real swing to it, Little Surprise's guitar line is unlike anything else they've done and shows their growing enthusiasm for world music while Blink Back A Tear makes me think of a tango or a Tex-Mex bar band. I love the idea of a parochial band singing about Friday nights out in small town England going out into the world and developing their sound and outlook. That's what I've always loved most about The Clash, a rejection of the small-minded indie mentality and an embrace of the whole planet. Regardless of whether you like their music, this part of their attitude was fantastic. That The WP's may follow in that tradition is an exciting thought and even if they only get halfway there we should get a good and interesting music out of it.
Also, the 2cd version with the bonus disc is well worth tracking down as the band don't seem to do below-par material. Apple Boy in particular makes me chuckle and Hear The Ferries Mooring may be familiar to anyone paying attention over the last couple years. I know some of these songs have already appeared on the 7 inchs but it will be a shame if they don't appear anywhere else and get lost to time. The band already have a pretty spectacular Hatful Of Hollow rarities compilation in them but I suspect this is something which no longer exists in the digital age. It may be the fate of these songs is to just be shared around on blogs and websites which would be a waste.
ReplyDeleteAlso, also, where the hell is the vinyl of this record??!
ReplyDelete