The Wave Pictures have a gift for making art of life’s cutting room floor. Fronted by David Tattersall, a sharp songwriter with crafty rhymes and a bullied-schoolboy vibrato, the trio has subsisted on the periphery of British indie for over a decade. While they hew to a one-take, soundbites-and-solos setup, their frequent output has been diverse enough to keep you checking in: Last year they released two quietly charming records, a collaboration with Herman Dune’s Stanley Binks and a full-LP cover of Daniel Johnston’s Artistic Vice. Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon is roughly their 16th album, their gnarliest yet, and it’s another collaboration, this one produced and co-written by beret-wearing punk artiste Billy Childish.
Their mutual attraction figures: Both are prolific pseudo-amateurs and hail from cities outside London where punk never took off but hasn’t really died, either. Solos aside, the Wave Pictures have always cut a more modest path than forebears Hefner and Orange Juice, but Great Big Flamingo’s garage-rock primitivism marks the first time they’ve really glamourized their limitations. The slight redirection is likely thanks to Childish, who was expelled from art school for having "an attitude of total rejection" and has since devoted his life to demystifying the pompous institutions of modern art and music. The single "Pea Green Coat" (punning on a line by nonsense poet Edward Lear) is not unlike a Childish painting, nailing a couple of neat memories—the bustling station, the garish coat in a sea of suits—to capture an alluring fragment.
That’s a highlight, and there are a few. Listening to songs like "Fake Fox Fur Pillowcase" and "All the Birds Lined Up Dot Dot Dot" is like reading an interesting person’s notebook with every second page ripped out. On the brilliantly hare-brained "Frogs Sing Loudly in the Ditches", any pretence towards plot vanishes, as if the notebook had been torn up in a huff and then hopelessly reassembled: "It’s raining champagne but I’m struggling to breathe/ You can hold them in your hand, that’s why they call them palm trees." Elsewhere, the bluesy riffs and relentlessly sparing observations wear thin. "The Fire Alarm", for one, darts poetically between "polka dot shorts" and a "peppermint tongue" without tying the loose visuals together. "Sinister Purpose" and "Green River", back-to-back Creedence Clearwater Revival covers included at Childish’s behest, might have benefited from an attitude of total rejection.
Much of the record’s activity occurs at a distance, drifting from the street and up through the window, and Tattersall casts the same curious eye on buzzing insects and street sounds as his own vague exploits. It would be misleading to separate plot from scene-setting, because often it's unclear which is which. Sometimes the domestic and external worlds merge sweetly–take the Larkin-like breeze that "whistles like a kettle" in "At Dusk You Took Down the Blinds". But later in the song, over plaintive Sunday-morning strums, Tattersall simply sends characters drifting between candlelit rooms. "We curl up like hedgehogs/ And whisper to one another," he teases in the chorus, but the content of those whispers is left hanging, and not in an appealing or enigmatic way. His style seems to be: What happened happened, and that’s that.
The best track here, "We Fell Asleep in the Blue Tent" tells a fleeting, straightforward love story over meandering bass and punk-club guitar stabs. Tattersall describes "moths all dancing underneath the streetlight, kids drinking cider in the shadows," before walking up with his companion for "paracetamol, pineapple juice and that first cigarette." It’s funny, pinpoint-sharp, and smartly evocative enough that Childish would probably consider it an irredeemable sell-out. But truthfully, Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon could use more songs like it. As it is, the album feels slightly cluttered by a surfeit of dry minutiae that calls for a cutting room floor of its own.
