“I don’t remember yesterday, but I remember when I was eight years old.” The opening lyrics of “Sure & Steady,” Gained / Lost’s second track, underline a core concern of UK indie stalwarts The Wave Pictures’ 20th (!) album: the passage of time, what can and cannot be remembered, what may or may not have a bearing on the here and now. A look at the images collected for the Exile On Main Street-style sleeve of Gained / Lost confirms what’s going on.
Thematic considerations aside, The Wave Pictures have a fondness for American musical archetypes. Despite guitarist and singer David Tattersall’s Edwyn Collins/Vic Goddard-esque voice, he and the band – Jonny Helm (drums) and Franic Rozycki (bass): a female vocalist who is not referred to in the promotional material is also heard – have, beyond a penchant for The Velvet Underground, a partiality for country (evident on the title track and album closer “Worry Anymore”) and a liking for The Modern Lovers (the “Pablo Picasso”-evoking “The Past Comes Back to Haunt me”). However, what really delineates Gained / Lost – and The Wave Pictures in general – is Tattersall’s guitar. He loves a guitar solo.
Gained / Lost sets itself up from the off. First cut “Alice” – which, overall, has a Tom Petty vibe – kicks off with Tattersall’s solo guitar dominating proceedings: the singing starts 30 seconds in. His penetrating yet elegant, architecturally precise guitar lines sit at the centre of a figurative Venn diagram encompassing Tom Verlaine, Neil Young and, had he been more interested in lyricism than noise, The Dream Syndicate’s Karl Precoda. Oddly, what comes to mind as a like-minded bedfellow of Gained / Lost is The Dream Syndicate’s 1986 post-Precoda album Out Of The Grey.
It is strange, then, that an album by a British band which has been active since the late 1990s evokes an aspect of the sound of post-Paisley Underground America. It seems that it’s not just their own past which is of interest to The Wave Pictures.
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