A few months ago, Nathan Williams of Wavves uploaded an image onto Instagram with the caption ‘nu album cover’. It was a parody of the cover of KoЯn’s 1999 album, Issues, and its name was cribbed from TLC’s Crazy Sexy Cool. NME didn’t realise that it was a joke and ran a story on Wavves’ nu-metal and R&B influences. It was very funny, and everybody laughed, Nathan Williams most of all.
Wavves have come a long way from writing the lo-fi, no-bass, garage-rock-that-was-literally-recorded-in-a-garage of 2009’s Wavvves. Just a year later King of the Beach was produced by Dennis Herring, having worked for giants such as Modest Mouse, Costello and Counting Crows (he also worked for The Hives but I’m not sure they count as a ‘giant’). Wavves’ newest LP, however, Afraid of Heights, saw supervision from none other than John Hill. He’s worked with Rihanna. But despite the big boys in the studio watching over their shoulders, I think that Wavves essentially have the same attitude they did in 2009. The fuzz might have cleared up, but as twitter has showed us, Williams has no clear intentions of growing up too quickly, and bassist Stephen Pope still has some of the most teenager-y hair I’ve ever seen on a man (it’s spectacular, by the way). Sony’s just given them a lot of money to do what they do, and we all know what everyone spends their money on in California. Pope, with his flowing locks, told MTV that the band would regularly drink with producer Hill till 2 or 3 in the morning, possibly explaining why the album took a year to record. They’re still writing songs about dropping out, growing up and getting fucked up, now it’s just from the position of established musicians.
The opening song, ‘Sail to the Sun’, whilst being about weed, is about more than just dank nugs, with Nathan William’s plaintive cry doing an excellent job of articulating some of the angst that goes along with acting out – “I don’t wanna get left behind… I’m gonna pick you up in my arms, give you all my love / First we gotta get high / And sail to the sun…” Their noisy brand of pop punk is book ended by sweet twinkly pitched percussion and dissonant guitar noise, before giving us the second single of the album, ‘Demon to Lean On’. The song itself is catchy as shit, we’d expect nothing less, and again the chorus delivers some adorable confessional lyrics, “Holding a gun to my head / So send me an angel / Or bury me deeply instead / with demons to lean on.” It’s pretty emo. But it’s earnest, just like the instrumentation. Now it’s not like anyone’s grandmother will be getting into Wavves, but there is something deeply endearing about their melodic garage, more careless than carefree, that crops up again in the album’s title track: “I think I’m dying / Maybe I’m thirsty / I think I must be drunk. / Woke up and found Jesus / I think I must be drunk.” Nathan Williams takes us through emotional territory, check out ‘Beat Me Up’ for a brilliant narrative on submissiveness in relationships that is, according to MTV, founded on his own encounters with some “Jersey Shore Armenian dudes”.
Afraid of Heights has its downers, with ‘Everything Is My Fault’ and ‘I Can’t Dream’ providing the Good Riddance relief to the Basket Case of the rest of the record, and whilst there’s enough variety to keep me from changing the music, there wasn’t exactly enough to keep me from tuning out from time to time. 2009’s Wavvves managed to do that through sheer coercion, along with how fun it made booze and bud sound. Don’t get me wrong, I think Afraid of Heights is a great album. It’s just not THAT great, y’know? It’s nothing to write home about, unless by that you mean a wall post to your younger brother. But it’s not exactly like Nathan Williams set out a manifesto to reinvent the wheel. Or black metal. Or anything, for that matter. It’s still a great record, and I doubt Wavves give a shit if I zone out whilst listening to it. It’s confessional, it’s catchy, and it’s made by stoners. What else was I expecting?
