Release Date: March 27th, 2013
A band gleefully cluttering merch tables with their own brand of weed grinders and packing eardrums with munchies punk, Wavves is still slashing their mean streak of white noise while comfortably noodling into whiny stoner rock with their fourth release. Walking hard and standing tall without the sunny disposition and shameless penchant for cats in his Cali gal pal Bethany Cosentino, Nathan Williams is doing bad all by himself, and sounding a hell of a lot better with Afraid of Heights. Sounding as grit-gargled as ever, the softcore punk magnets have released 13 tracks of ballistic, battered punk-pop drawing inspiration from Nirvana as much as the Blue Album. Sound like a mess of a salute to 90s rock? Well, it sorta is.
After systematically chopping their scope for the past few albums, Wavves finally seemed to have hit a focused stride of engagement with the Life Sux EP and have carried that hard fought focus into their latest. Opener “Sail To The Sun” chimes in with chirpy xylophone and sounds more like a deranged lullaby than a surf rock exposition. A knuckle cranking bass lines cuts through the dolled-up tinsel and Nathan Williams tackles through mildly retrospective nuggets of wisdom like “but we’ll all die, that’s just the way we live, in a grave.” Of course, to reach this freshly tilled high ground, Williams suggests that he succumbs to his sophomoric vices and hits a bowl first. And so begins the babbling, lo-fi comedy of Wavves’ catalog.
The album’s mucky leader of the pack, “Demon to Lean On,” showcases Williams’ shameless admiration for Rivers Cuomo, swaying between a THC-coated whine and strung-out apathy. From the headstrong vocals and breathless joke of vibrato, the single amounts to a fuzzy “best-of-90s-rock” formula that still reeks of effortless originality. The chorus carries some artificial girth slapped on Williams’ vocals, a lax emulation of a Cobanian rampage. The raucous duo is still leaning toward the mucky Seattle sound with a dose of Cali Vitamin D, and it’s certainly a highlight of the 13-track behemoth.
The title track rolls through an intro of Prozac-packed “woo’s” courtesy of Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis. The truth pulsing through the refrain “I think I must be drugged” seeps through the nonchalant delivery and casts a sardonic shadow over the 5-minute tune. Williams drills into caverns of paranoia and loneliness, proving that he does have an emotional backbone–he just prefers to shroud it with tattered band tee’s and fuzz pedals. They duo may not even realize they’re delving into such cerebral themes, and that’s what’s so appealing; they’re just a couple outcasts stumbling toward illumination, right alongside us clueless bastards.
Quickly relapse into the crashing grind of their former ranting and raving punk pop with “Beat Me Up.” Williams’ clocked time in with textural in Sweet Valley and that contributed to more developed sound, especially evident in the spatial glide of “Everything Is My Fault.” The unexpectedly guilt-wrought track isn’t quite an apology, but a frustrated kick in the dirt, an unwelcome realization. The vicious circle of “life sux-let’s get high” catch-22 of every self-loathing drug den fixture becomes tired and beaten.
The album caps on a surprisingly docile note with “I Can’t Dream.” The title is nearly tragic, a red flag poking out of the shrapnel scattered after nearly 30 minutes of sonic tailspin. The lyric “Dear whoever you are, in the light of day I can finally sleep” stands alone as a crystalline lament, flashing a welcomed shred of vulnerability that seems uncomfortably naked against its 12 wayward, drug-addled siblings.
Wavves ultimately amounts to a kinetic tag team of assholes with glittering hearts of gold…at least that’s what we tell ourselves. Nathan Williams is just a misguided product of maladjusted youth—an inner-rebel that rattling within all of us, a doped-up rat gnawing the bars of the cage we call adulthood, garnering attention the only way he knows how. And job well done, Mr. Williams, because we’re certainly listening, but maybe not for all the right reasons.
Wavves – Afraid of Heights tracklist:
- “Sail To The Sun”
- “Demon To Lean On”
- “Mystic”
- “Lunge Forward”
- “Dog”
- “Afraid of Heights” (ft. Jenny Lewis)
- “Paranoid”
- “Cop”
- “Beat Me Up”
- ” Everything Is My Fault”
- “That’s On Me”
- “Gimme A Knife”
- “I Can’t Dream”
