Review: Wavves – Wavvves (2009)
Wavves is the psuedonym for Nathan Williams, 22-year-old festival socialite. Wavvves is a big ticket; to say that it’s been a hotly anticipated release would be a gross understatement. In short, the only thing Williams could have done to make his record any riper for indie consumption would be to pass over the CD pressing outright, releasing only vinyl. Or, better still, he could release it all on cassette tape. Despite all the hype, even from pundits whose opinions we have come to respect and cherish, the album is remarkably short on depth. On the other hand, it’s high on energy (and really, kudos for that, at least), but we are not dealing with a child here. This is a grown man who should be expected to contribute in a meaningful way to the musical commonality we have all constructed.
Even discounting the process of switching record labels to Oxford-based Fat Possum, Williams was able to cut two full-length albums — with virtually the same title, no surprise there — in four months. Look at it from one angle, and you see the very same wheelbarrow on the cover that our nameless skateboarder was balancing atop on the first album’s cover. Look at it from another angle, and this is variations on a theme to a degree that it approaches a Wesley Willis tribute album. Where the songwriting does touch on brilliance and originality (“Goth Girls,” “Beach Goth”…are you sensing a pattern here?), it’s still cut off at the knees by the unchecked torrent of arbitrary fuzz and static.
It isn’t that the album is willfully difficult. In fact, it’s almost the opposite: it’s that it never, at any point, appears to be willful at all. These aimless timbres touted as integral to Williams’ approach are not a part of the aesthetic. This is because there is no aesthetic, and there never was; there was never a decided sound nor any discernible affection ruling the creative process. It’s all little more than the by-product of an existence that mostly appears to revolve around weed and boredom. One can’t call that brilliance, they can only call it happenstance.
At best, Wavvves is a critical aberration, that, when editors emerge from their fugue state, will eventually amount to little more than a footnote in the annals of lo-fi. If Williams wants to actually have an impact, he hasn’t made it plain. He could perhaps start with a manifested interest in his writing process. This isn’t a musical conspiracy theory, and there isn’t some sinister cadre of critics peddling unspeakably horrendous music for their own dastardly purposes. But the obsession with and unquestioning worship of indifference — and in reality, that’s what Wavvves projects more than anything else — have really got to stop.
Hail the conquering lo-fi hero. Or don’t…whatever, man. It isn’t as if he appears to care, at any rate.
