Wavves
King Of The Beach

Lazy and indolent, perhaps anesthetized by the bottles of Jameson he systematically downs at every concert, Nathan Williams has needed, all in all, very little to win the covers of the most fashionable music magazines. A brawl, high on ecstasy and Valium, with his drummer before a concert, a totally naïve and self-referential debut and a declared love for substances (a 24-year-old alcoholic) have made him a sort of new maudit of international independent music. A kind of punk for the MDMA generation.

But, apart from this third-rate gossip, Nathan Williams will not be the new addition to the crowded lineup of indie-meteorites created by the trade press in recent years and, after abandoning the low fidelity and his brazen style up to the grotesque of his debut, this bold young man with the stylish tuft offers us one of the freshest and most vital rock'n'roll of the last decade. "King Of The Beach" (Fat Possum) is, in fact, a record, finally, made of songs and equipped with a production. It's a fun and amused album of noisy guitar pop, which sounds like an adolescent microcosm, like the entire Californian punk school (Adolescents first of all), like the best American indie school (Hüsker Dü, Nirvana, Sebadoh, Superchunk, Pavement, Pixies...) and like the late Jay Reatard (Reatards era), of which it carries the baton and rhythm section, a reason why this is no longer a Wavves record, but of the Wavves (Stephen Pope and Billy Hayes write three songs in total). It's sunny (indie-)rock, starting from the surf suggestions of the album title, and impertinent from start to finish, with some moments of lazy psychedelia (more from stasis than from journey; more for teenagers from chill-out rooms than from Timothy Leary tickets) between one chorus and another. Not completely abandoning certain noisy elements of his first album, here Williams, while having fun here and there with keyboards and synthesizers, reverses their tendency: no longer pop under a noise shell, but pop as prized and already peeled pulp. Noteworthy, ça va sans dire, the ability of this 24-year-old to carve out such a consistent bunch of memorable melodies, so clear as to recall the unforgettable ones of the Mersey Beatles, the bubblegum Ramones, and the airy harmonies of the Beach Boys.

For once, then, the right one ends up on the cover. Because, Nathan Williams' just havin' fun!