Wavves - King Of The Beach
Fuzz-rock dork turns awesome on 'sophomore' album
Second albums are difficult at the best of times, but for Nathan Williams it must've been an absolute nightmare. The twentysomething otherwise known as Wavves found surprise success with his much-blogged debut album: a collection of noisy, ear-splittingly distorted punk nuggets. Then, just as he'd been propelled to online stardom, Williams had a spectacular on-stage breakdown at the Primavera festival in 2009 and everything fell apart.
It's a good job then that, in the ensuing months, he sorted himself out, because new album 'King Of The Beach' is an absolute gem. Now teamed up with the late Jay Reatard's backing band, '...Beach' is a focused and surprisingly brilliant collection of catchy lo-fi rock, and a middle finger to critics and naysayers alike.
Quite simply, this might just be the record that saves punk-pop. The genre has been rotting like a corpse for nearly a decade now, with many bands content to rest on their cringeworthy early-2000s-baggy-shorted laurels, and only the likes of Motion City Soundtrack are making anything approaching fresh or interesting. But Wavves has crafted an album that not only harks back to its glory days - take 'Post Acid's Blink 182-isms - but tears it apart and remoulds it into something altogether more exciting.
Title track 'King Of The Beach' is fantastic Californian beach punk at its best, while the likes of 'Super Soaker' and 'Take On The World' are raucuous, snotty, self-hating jams that'll stay with you like a nasty bout of Venice Beach sunburn. The album's balanced perfectly with gentler slacker rock: 'Linus Spacehead's Pavement-esque pop and 'When Will You Come's 60s stomp are sensible breaks in the fuzzy onslaught. Wavves even get electro, too, on the bizarrely bonkers 'Convertable Balloon', and 'Baby Say Goodbye' sounds like a massive chart hit beamed in from another dimension. It's that kind of eclectic, give-a-shit attitude that makes Williams, and 'King Of The Beach', so irresistible: more bands would do well to take his lead. A total triumph.
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