City Forgiveness Release Day!

It's October the 21st which means the new WP's record is in stores now. I'm looking forward to hearing it properly but advance word certainly makes it seem like this is their defining artistic statement to date. Go buy it now!

http://thewavepictures.bandcamp.com/album/city-forgiveness

There's mention of a 7 inch of Lisbon too, also out today, but it's not immediately obvious if this actually exists. There's a non-lp bside called One By One on it so let's hope it doesn't become another phantom 45 like Spaghetti (which is still listed as being released on 7inch on their website - and never was).

Meanwhile, a nice track-by-track has been published by This Is Fake DIY - http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/features/in-pictures-the-wave-pictures-city-forgiveness/

In Pictures: The Wave Pictures - City Forgiveness

Dave Tattersall puts together a pictorial guide to the American road trip that helped make new album 'City Forgiveness'.

Posted 17th October 2013, 1:38pm in Features

The Wave Pictures' new double album 'City Forgiveness' is a colossal thing, put together in just one week, so the story goes. But it's a well-travelled beast, its ideas emerging from weeks and weeks on the road with Allo Darlin', where American nothingness collided with strange sightings and all the food a hungry band could possibly eat.

"We visited Hank Williams' house and Billy The Kid's grave, watched the Golden Gate bridge disappear into the clouds, and had our frisbee confiscated by a cop," tells Dave Tattersall. "We played some great shows together, and we became good friends, and we drove and we drove and we drove and we drove."

While endlessly driving around, Dave scribbled all his sightings into a notebook. These would eventually make up the thoughts and themes of 'City Forgiveness. "Anything that popped into my head went in the notebook. When I returned home to London, I had a few hundred crumpled, well-travelled pages at the bottom of my bag," he explains.

What followed was "a very jet-lagged and confused week, immediately after the tour.

"I had emptied out the notebook: it was just like unpacking. We clearly had a double album on our hands; not a concept album about America so much as a testament to the way that travel excites the imagination.

"The title came to me in a dream several weeks after the trip. Nothing useful has ever come to me in a dream before, so I felt that I had better use it. The title reminds me of City Lights: both the beautiful Charlie Chaplin movie and the Los Angeles company who published Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'. The dream was about the trip: running at midnight in some American city, on what they would call a sidewalk, I pull a vinyl album out of what they would call a trashcan; it is the most beautiful vinyl album I have ever seen and the title is ''City Forgiveness''. I woke up enough to write these 2 words down on a takeaway pizza menu that happened to be by the bed, and fell back to sleep."

Accompanied with pictures from the trip, Dave put together a mammoth guide to the record; an audio-visual feast that connects what he saw on the road to what makes it into his band's latest album, out Monday 21st October on Moshi Moshi Records.

All photos credited to: Will Botting / Allo Darlin'

ALL MY FRIENDS
This has something of a late night New York diner feel to it. Jack Nicholson drinking coffee in ''The Last Detail''. Edward Hopper's ''Nighthawks''. Chandler Bing dumping Janice in the background. In the first week of our travels around America, I found a novel called ''All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers'' in a Salvation Army thrift store in Brooklyn, and carried it with me, unread, for the rest of the trip.

BEFORE THIS DAY
This tells the story of the first day that I can remember; what I take to be my very earliest memories. I am running through the long grass, yet to be cut, behind the house in Wymeswold that my family moved to when I was three years old. I am the same me that I am now, but considerably smaller.

Travel does this to you: it shakes loose these buried memories from home.

CHESTNUT
This is what happens to bands that eat huevos rancheros every day for six weeks.



BETTER TO HAVE LOVED
We played a Tequila festival in Tucson, Arizona. We were on after a kind of rock/mariachi/bachata band with a cowbell player, a drummer and a percussionist. They were very laid back and groovy. The guitar player liked his wah-wah pedal. They played outside, and we danced to their music and drank tequila with a hundred or so other revellers. Then we went inside and played our show to an audience of two people. We were on fire though, as I recall. That band had really excited me. I think of them sometimes. I don't know who they were, but they were great. They could play a great cover version of this song.

MISSOULA
Missoula is in Montana. This is a love song, pure and simple. A love song to motels and beer bellies.

LISBON
This is a song about flying home to see your loved ones after a long trip. It is a song about the first cup of coffee on a day that has already been very long by 9 in the morning. It is a song about almond butter and about cuddles. It is a song about travelling, and the end of travelling. It's a song about carrying a tune in your head, getting home and writing it down.

Singing about ''Little Richard on the radio'' is wishful thinking: if only.



RED CLOUD ROAD (Part 2)
Red Cloud Road is a real road in California. Red Cloud Road is also ''a high energy band in Longmont, Colorado playing covers of your favorite hit songs'', according to their Facebook page. It also sounds like a level on the popular computer game Super Mario Brothers.

This song is a little play, and it's a sequel, too, of course. Part one, featuring the same two characters, will be available soon. In my head, I like to cast Jane Russell and Robert Ryan as the two leads in this little play, but feel free to pick your own. Just don't let Daniel Day Lewis anywhere near it.

THE WOODS
In Lubbock, Texas, we visited the Buddy Holly museum, ate breakfast burritos and played pool with the locals. In Chico, California, we ate ice cream all day and slept on mattresses that were infested with the cocoons of black widow spiders. We watched Terminator 3 in a Holiday Inn in Alabama. We drove over the state line into Florida to buy beer on a Sunday. We slept like sardines in a can in Philadelphia, in the home of an enormous grey cat. We ate macaroni cheese by the Mississippi river in Minneapolis. We watched Paul Simon read his favourite Phillip Larkin poem in a lecture theatre in New York. We looked in the gift shop of the Seattle space needle, but didn't go to the top because it was too expensive. All the while the notebook was filling up.



WHISKY BAY
Whisky Bay is in Louisiana, where we performed for an audience of three in Baton Rouge, in a bar stuffed full of pool tables called the Spanish Moon. Fats Domino on the van stereo in the morning sunshine the next day, driving with bellies full with exquisite omelettes. This is another love song, and a very happy one too.

THE YELLOW ROSES
Hawaiian shirts, sunshine and freedom, versus bitterness, pettiness and regret.

In San Francisco I bought hawaiian shirts by the pound, the way you would buy mince.

TROPIC
The narrator here is a parent who has outlived his child. I have spent a bit of time with parents who have lost a child. The pain is permanently present.

The line ''There is loneliness and pain, it is written in the earth'' comes from Henry Miller's ''Tropic of Cancer'', hence the title. The two books I took with me on the tour of America were ''Tropic of Cancer'' and ''Poet In New York'' by Lorca. Lorca appears in this song too. I never finished ''Tropic of Cancer'' – it is very good but it is also too long.

THE INATTENTIVE READER
Looking at the moon in Lisbon, walking through the market square in Hamburg, thinking about Buddy Holly again. Chatting in bed at midnight in the basement flat beneath a bar, a Matisse print on the wall, 'Bringing It All Back Home' on the CD player.

If this song was a type of food, it would be a slice of New York pizza. If this song was an item of clothing, it would be a hawaiian shirt.

SHELL
Driving into Georgia, deep in the night, and trying to set an absent friend straight. People tend to think they are doing worse than they are. Like most songs, this is an open letter, a message in a bottle thrown into the sea.



THE ROPES
Hot air balloons in the sky, pool halls on the ground. Paul Newman in ''The Hustler'', baboons in the trees, Black Sabbath on the radio. You look up and see an old friend about to pass you on the street. You were close once but there's nothing to say anymore.

NARROW LANE
Driving up the west coast of America with Wymeswold on my mind.

ATLANTA
I believe that I wrote these words underneath a green umbrella, with a Turkish tea, outside a restaurant called Tallulah's in Atlanta, surrounded by the shimmering rain. But I do not remember.

NEW SKIN
This song reminds me of Chicago, of the waitresses at Schuba's Tavern putting their own money into the jukebox to play 'Somebody I Used To Know' by Gotye over and over and over and over again. When I returned home from the tour I suffered from jet-lag induced insomnia and I partly blame Gotye for this. His Sting-like hit song played ceaselessly in my head. Sleep was impossible. I lost my mind. All I could do was wander around my east London flat like a ghost, and write songs. This song is probably the one on the album that is the most like ''Somebody I Used To Know'', though I sincerely hope that does not sound off-putting. I would also hate to disappoint any Chicago waitresses who might happen upon this text. The two songs are not very similar.

A CRACK IN THE PLANS
Conceived in a rooftop jacuzzi, high above Los Angeles, after watching a four hour documentary on the career of Woody Allen.

I really did look a fox in the face once, in the shadow of a burger stand, on Woodlands Road in Glasgow, when I lived above the Halt Bar there.



GOLDEN SYRUP
The narrator here is an old man. I picture Henry Miller in ''Tropic of Cancer'', as played by Charlie Chaplin.

LIKE SMOKE
Sex and death, black back teeth and looming rainclouds, pretty pink flowers and curious calves, red wine in the plastic cup outside the funeral home, the wood oven and the pizza inside it, rows of chimney stacks, ashes in the wind, the trick-or-treating kids in my block who change their costumes and come back again and again for more sweets, bursting into laughter, John Fahey playing ''When You Wore A Tulip (And I Wore A Big Red Rose)'', emptying out the notebook like an upturned suitcase, grandparents and babies and us somewhere in the middle.