Wavves
King Of The Beach

Exaggerated

The raw and unfiltered dialect is served to me by listening to Wavves with their "King of the Beach," an album that has captured the hearts of too many people who have randomly or purposefully sat in my car. In my car, there is an unwritten rule that everyone knows; the same album spins for a month... yes, that's exactly right! I listen to 12 albums a year in the car, or a bit of radio to unwind, and more so, the albums that rotate for months are those that I bought but did not particularly impress me, albums that play second fiddle in the home stereo but reign supreme in the car, ready to change my mind. And often the game works, and an album that didn't appeal to me much before, after a distracted yet perennial listening in the car, returns and plays in the top league in my home stereo. Naturally, there's also the other side of the coin, and if even the car doesn't redeem it, that album goes "straight through" to a small pile of albums I have in the room—the "Forgotten Pile."

I was in the car, everyone liked King of the Beach, I liked it, the windshield washers liked it, why was it there? Why in the car? Such a beautiful album, which opens with a summer song that makes you want to smile and says: "you are the King of the Beach," makes you tap your fingers on the steering wheel at the traffic light; then "Super Soaker" starts with its "tu tuuuru tu ruuu ruuu" and those bass lines you feel on your ankle while you press the clutch to downshift because you start driving like an eighteen-year-old who just got their license, and the end of the song tells you "stuupiiid."

The album continues beautifully with indie, lo-fi, post-punk tracks all glazed with noise that doesn't annoy, but the real gem is found towards the end. I'm talking about "Linus Spacehead," a liberating song "I’m stuck in the sky, I’m never coming down," wonderful.

I have spoken great words about this album, yet I find it in the car, and only last night did I understand why. I simply got tired of standing still at traffic lights with songs that don't make me tap my fingers on the steering wheel; even in the car, I deserve something truly beautiful occasionally.