The Wave Pictures – Instant Coffee Baby

It’s better to be honest, right? So here goes: Imagine Edwyn Collins meeting Lawrence Hayward and the lovechild getting the life sucked out of it – that’d be what ‘Instant Coffee Baby’ brings to mind.

The vocals aren’t deadpan enough to get away with it, the seemingly constant filler cringe-inducing, and every song without fail doesn’t live up to the promise of its initial thirty seconds. As a second pre-amble, happing upon The Wave Pictures a few weeks ago supporting someone far better meant endowment with bias of the worst variety – but being as objective as possible in a subjective world of taste meant that in fact instinct is usually entrenched for a reason.

Here’s a third foreword: where they don’t know what else to do, they go for guitar solo (see ‘Kiss Me’); where there’s an opportunity to step it up a gear, they squeak and squawl and presumably go “hey, let’s just do what Orange Juice did”. Numero Four: how is it possible that forefather Darren Hayman let them tour with him? Or Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle used them as his backing band? It makes rationality sit back and wonder, even if the deities in question are of unimpeachable delectation.

Fifth, a small qualification: lyrical faux-cute isn’t desirable (at least not most of the time), it’s dull. But with a bit more panache, wordiness could’ve partially assuaged the other charges. It’s not even a disappointment but instead, a complete non-entity of a record.