Last year was a bittersweet one for Wavves. The band released their excellent sophomore collection of fuzz punk early in the year to much acclaim only to be followed by mainman Nathan Williams less than brilliant performance at the Primavera Sound Festival in Spain after ingesting a cocktail of ecstasy and valium. Unfortunately some rather influential music sites on the interweb took to the incident like a LiLo moment on TMZ. Williams was suddenly painted as an unstable trainwreck at worst, and a dick at best. In reality Williams, who only a year before had released his first album, was feeling pressure to perform while coping with becoming an indie rock darling overnight, and made a very bad decision on how to deal with it all. Williams canceled the band's European tour so he could get his shit together and issued an apology that appeared pretty heartfelt, stating at the end "I made a mistake. Not the first mistake I've made and it for sure wont be the last. I'm human. Don't know why I chose the biggest platform I could imagine to loose my shit, but that's life. You live and you learn." Unfortunately the blogosphere were less forgiving. Williams broke his arm during a skateboarding accident a few weeks later, allowing everyone to recall and reprint the Primavera incident, subtly implying that Williams was still just kind of a trainwreck. Then there was a bar fight with the Black Lips (although Williams seemed more than justified to pop the Lips' Jared Swilley in the face). So yeah, it was kind of a contentious year for Nathan Williams, add to this that drummers came and went, and more than a few voices in the blogosphere questioned Wavves' sustainability.Things started to turn late last year when former Jay Reatard backing band members drummer Billy Hayes and bassist Stephen Pope joined Williams to make Wavves a fully functioning trio. The band went into the studio together and began working on what would become "King of the Beach." Early on Williams announced that the album would signal a change in direction from previous records. He stated that he didn't want to make the same album again, and that the new album would be something completely different than what he had produced before. To his credit Williams wasn't kidding. "King of the Beach" sounds very little like Wavves' previous work, for better and worse.
The better is that the band has adopted a much cleaner production style, while still keeping the guitars nice and fuzzy. There is a crisp leanness to many of the tracks that serves the songs well. Williams has always been a skilled pop songwriter, but on previous works one had to dig beneath the rubble of lo-fi noise to get at the melodies. On "King of the Beach" the melodies are front and center. As a result, tracks like "Super Soaker" and "Post Acid" are on the short list for best songs of the year. Both are pop masterpieces of stop start dynamics, soaring choruses and inspired bridges and breakdowns. Even lesser tracks like "Idiot" are catchy as hell because hooks that previously would have been buried under static stand out crystal clear.
The worse is that when Williams attempts to stretch beyond the pop punk that he does best, he falls flat. "When Will You Come" is the album's first indication that not all of the songs are going to be in the red guitar blowouts. It's a pleasant enough drowsy slab of 60s SoCal beach pop, but nothing revelatory. Unfortunately Williams doesn't stop there. Songs like "Baseball Cards" "Mickey Mouse" and the unforgivable "Convertible Balloon" drag the album down with songs that sound like half-hearted attempts to cross breed the Beach Boys with Animal Collective. Thankfully Hayes and Pope save the day with their contributions "Linus Spacehead" and "Baby Say Goodbye" both of which provide strong album closers. Hopefully these guys will step up to the plate more often in the future, especially when Williams gets the urge to pull out "Pet Sounds" for inspiration.
In the end "King of the Beach" is a mixed bag. The album contains some of the best songs of this year, but also some of the most underbaked (or maybe overbaked given Williams propensity for weed). I still strongly recommend it because the highs outweigh the lows and the highs are really high (no weed pun intended this time). Even if you have to live with "Convertible Balloon," the songs that make this album worthwhile are plentiful and they are so good that they easily allow for a blind eye toward the few songs that admittedly suck. It's good to see Williams stretching out a bit and changing things up, but a great songwriter knows their limitations as well. As Williams said in his apology for the Spanish incident, "you live and you learn." Hopefully he adopts that same attitude to the experiments gone wrong on "King of the Beach."
Wheeler, who apparently hates all things fun, really hates Wavves, as will become abundantly clear in a moment. The following is a smattering of her commentary as I listened to the entire album:
"Why are you playing Blink 182?"
"How can you listen to this without hurting someone or yourself?"
"Do we have to listen to this whole thing? I'm not even trying to give you quotes here."
"Can't have a hipster album without video game sound effects, can ya?"
"Oh God, sounds like someone has been listening to 'Pet Sounds'."
"What happened is he smoked too much pot and recorded this high and didn't play it for anyone else before he released it."
"I actually like this part - the part where it is ending. No, seriously I like that outro."
"Super Soaker" live
Awesome Charlie Brown "King of the Beach" fan video
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