wave pictures nearly carbon neutral

Surely making a play for being Britain's hardest working bands, or just intent on wringing every last royalty out of their record deal (I'm sure it's the former), the marvellous Wave Pictures have yet another new record out this week - the Pigeon EP. This would ordinarily be interesting in itself, for their ramshackle, naive and yearning songs have shone very brightly this year, but it's particularly interesting in that the band are promoting the single as the 'greenest single ever'.

In order to make what they hoped would be the world's first carbon neutral EP, the band (and their engineer) walked to the solar powered studio where they recorded the four songs (actually made in tandem with fellow Moshi Moshi labelmates Slow Club), then uploaded the results directly to the internet afterwards. There's no art work, no physical product, and no press-release to accompany it. Unfortunately they didn't quite manage their aim of going fully carbon-neutral, as they needed to fire up their servers to deliver the songs to iTunes - but that aside it's pretty impressive stuff.

What you really want to know, of course, is whether the songs are as good as those on the band's wonderful Instant Coffee Baby LP, or the even better Just Like A Drummer single which followed it. No fear of disappointment here - on a couple of listens every song is a winner, but the best is Long Island, a live-favourite of such wondrous beauty that is was almost inexplicable that it wasn't recorded for the album.

It's been worth the wait though. The Wave Pictures are not just busy and environmentally aware, then, but also bloody brilliant.