The Wave Pictures – Pigeon EP

‘Long Island’ is The Wave Pictures’ best song. Sure, Instant Coffee Baby was good but its oddly-apparently-written-out-of-history predecessor Sophie had LONG FUCKING ISLAND, a magical 3-and-something-minutes stream-of-consciousness stomp through”¦ well, like, “the last swimmers crawled up from the pool, looked at my beautiful belly and drooled” and stuff like that. I think I would go even so far to say that it is one of the best songs written *of all time*, fully aware of the hyperbole but I don’t even care. I mean The Wave Pictures have done some other really good songs but ‘Now You Are Pregnant’ is beautiful and magical yeah but its just ever-(ever-so-slightly) you know, *obviously* beautiful and magical, whereas ‘Long Island’ is waaaayy off-kilter and counter-intutive. And the stuff on ‘Instant Coffee Baby’, a lot of it like the title track and ‘Avocado Baby’ and ‘Cassius Clay’ and such are top-quality songs, but I’m not going to list them with the all-time greats. ‘Long Island’ though, wow”¦ when trawling their back catalogue for good bits of ‘Instant Coffee’ hey, maybe they should have considered that gem. Only thing is the version of ‘Sophie’ is pretty much there already, but they could have slapped it in somewhere for sure.

That’s the real story here, the fact that the Pigeon EP has ‘Long Island’ on it. Its also some “green EP” or something that you can only get on the internet and was recorded on the fly with Slow Club backing them which I guess is kind of cool and I suppose gives it most of its appeal, minus of course how amazing ‘Long Island’ is, but we’ve covered that. The version here is”¦ well this is basically a live-in-the-studio affair, so its rougher and shakier and different to what I’m used to but you can’t hide songwriting like that. And the rest of the songs are like ‘David’s Evening On Wheels’ and such which are pretty typical Wave Pictures really so, you know. Good. (and it was on ‘Airplanes At Brescia’ too which is ANOTHER Wave Pictures record that was available before their debut but shhhhhh I think someone powerful doesn’t want you to know that Instant Coffee Baby isn’t really their first album).

Has the market, like, totally suffered from an oversaturation of Wave Pictures recently though? I gave the Just Like A Drummer EP a positive review on this website only I just realized I haven’t actually listened to it since, its not actually *that* good a record, I just figured I liked Wave Pictures so by extension what I was listening to I liked, even though the songs are hardly *classic* Wave Pictures. Not that I think its bad though”¦ just”¦ do we really *need* it? Well, I guess of course we didn’t need it, and we don’t need the ‘Pigeon’ EP too, but I’ve got it for free because I write for a fast-growing music website and so who’s complaining? Its extra songs from a band I really like. And it has an alternate version of ‘Long Island’ on which we can all treasure forever and ever. So I’m going to give this record a score in the mid-60s but rest assured, I still think you should probs get it if you like the band. As I very much do.
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The Wave Pictures on Myspace