Every now and then a band emerges and changes everything. Their sound rattles walls, breaks boundaries and challenges the set-in-stone rules of rock ‘n’ roll. They leave critics speechless and scrambling helplessly for descriptions and remind listeners why they love music in the first place. Wavves is not one of these bands.
The noisy slacker-punk creation from 23-year old Nathan Williams was indie rock’s biggest viral sensation last year. With blogosphere buzz and a generous eight-point nod from Pitchfork for their self-titled album, Wavves skyrocketed to unimaginable heights, appearing everywhere from the Primavera Sound festival to the New York Times.
And a year later, following a painfully public, drug-fueled breakdown in Barcelona and a fracas with the flower-punk sensations Black Lips, the impish surf rocker has returned, this time supposedly clean and supported by two members of the late Jay Reatard’s backing band, Bill Hayes and Stephen Pope.
On the new album “King of the Beach,” Wavves — now a three-piece — has endured a bit of a facelift production-wise. Unlike previous efforts, the sound is crisp and clear but isn’t devoid of Williams’ distinct nasally vocals and poppy four-chord crunch.
Williams’ melodies are consistently catchy, but when you peel back the layers of glossy production, “King of the Beach” is really just another dose of no-frills, beach-party punk that only begs the question of “Why are we paying so much attention to this guy in the first place?”
The real issue with Wavves isn’t so much that the music is of poor quality. It’s that the songs are so shamelessly unoriginal and overdone that the amount of coverage Williams’ receives is baffling, if not infuriating. There are few cases of manufactured hype as criminally outlandish as the Wavves phenomenon.
“You can find someone in your hometown doing the same thing and probably doing it better,” said Ali Jaafar, front man of local Goth post-punk act Zombie Season.
And Minneapolis sees no shortage of groups who operate in the same mold, whether it’s scene stalwarts like the Red Pens or lesser-known acts like Teenage Moods or Sleeping in the Aviary.
“And because they’re from your hometown you can go see their shows for free and probably get the records for free and hang out with them and it’s no big thing,” Jaafar added.
It’s a not-so-rosy fairytale that could only exist in our absurdist Age of Irony: A bratty borderline-talented housecat sets down his bong and crawls out of his basement just long enough to be heralded as Pitchfork’s next big thing, only to fall victim to his own childlike petulance shortly afterward. And even despite his tarnished image, Williams is still making records and getting airplay.
It only makes Fat Possum Records president Matthew Johnson’s impetus for signing Williams all the more unnerving. “This sounds like snot, it’s totally disposable, it’s just a mess, it’s totally on drugs and drunk. I have to sign it,” Johnson said to The Los Angeles Times in March of 2008.
But perhaps Williams sums it up best. In the curiously self- flagellating and seemingly sincere “Take on the World,” he sounds like an artist who can’t even comprehend his own hype: “I still hate my music / It’s all the same/ When it drips like moisture/ My head just hangs.”
It’s not that Wavves is a bad band. Nathan Williams’ hook-heavy surf rock is terribly catchy and the addition of Hayes and Pope only compliments his infectious pop-fused melodies. But the issue is that Wavves isn’t doing anything out of the ordinary or superlative to warrant this caliber of attention. Unlike his indie peers, Nathan Williams never really exploded onto the scene, he just snuck in through the back door.