Wavves - Wavvves (Bella Union)
3/5
By: Ellie Rose
BUY DOWNLOADWavves are something different, that's for sure. Imagine an illicit union between Black Lips and the Misfits, which instead of producing a beautiful DIY-punk lovechild, in fact resulted in a premature runt that was neither extraordinarily good-looking nor particularly clever; the kind of slightly ugly child that only close relatives can bring themselves to actually love. Imagine that runt spent 22 years listening to stoner rock, playing X-box and teaching himself how to play guitar chords using only his feet; imagine he eventually learned a way to make an amp produce more feedback than Sonic Youth can cultivate in their wildest, most distorted dreams; then imagine a record company offered him a big wad of weed money to put out an album. San Diego duo Wavves's second album Wavvves is the result.
This album's crackling lo-fi and extraordinary loose sound are both its strength and its weakness. It's the sound of a skate-park in summer, packed with skaters and stoners sucking on sun-warmed tinnies. The quirky, nostalgic melodies of 'Summer Goth' are lazily pleasant, and best listened to at high volume under a haze of cannabis smoke; in fact, several of the album's other brief tracks have a strange and surreal charm to them.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough of those spangly highlights to rescue this record from a dull and slightly weird repetitiveness. Five of the songs have the word 'Goth' in the title: is that Tennysonian poetic chic, or just plain laziness?
This album will no doubt attract a cult following; but since frontman Nathan Williams has cancelled the whole of Wavves's European tour following his very public breakdown at Primavera, I suspect it won't make the top ten defining records of this summer.
Artists in this article: Wavves
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