Wavves
Life Sux

"You're no fun, you're no fun, you're no fun, you're just dumb, you're no fun"

I see men&women tattooing phrases like "life is all about balance that flies away, a thrill above madness", "I have made indelible marks under the skin that I carry in my questionable days" and I wonder what mental discomfort drives them to inject ink with needles. You start by scratching a shoulder or ankle with some phrase that wants to be deep but actually whatthehelldoesitmeanohwell: from there to "the Americans are installing a microchip under our butts to control us!!1!" it's a short step. So while some of our acquaintances convince themselves they can make the world a better place by sharing fascistoid images on Facebook and another part becomes what their grandparents would have wanted them to become, we good people remain proud and smug in our ignorance. But we do it consciously, and that’s what’s important. Our motto will be something simpler, like "I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl", but we don't necessarily need to tattoo it on our butts: we’ve put a Mickey Mouse with ganja leaves on the eyes there. However, we could compose it from the beer cans we leave on the floor of our room (do they sell Pabst Blue Ribbon at the Eurospin around the corner?) or from the cigarette butts we scatter as teenagers at every bus stop.

As I ride depressed towards the quarter century, glimpsing a future that will consist of a lot of responsibility and (presumably) little satisfaction, as the mid-February sun rays warm the winter a bit, I turn back towards that foolish, carefree, and time-out-of-time teenage world that I have known only occasionally. Life Sux is the summa of Nathan Williams' thought: teetering between the mess and the dirt for its own sake (but conscious) of the early Wavves and the boundless foolishness of the second, this six-song EP has earned glory among wavvesians aficionados presenting the usual mix of bogus lo-fi, pop punk, boorish indie. It's always good to give yourself twenty minutes where you convince yourself you are what you thought you would be at twenty-five when you were seventeen: super cool, carefree, tremendously naive, and full of girls/exhausted by light drugs. Unfortunately, the dream sooner or later ends, but it must be so. With the excuse of awareness and detached irony, many people have remained stuck: you see them now, on the verge of thirty, following the worst television trash (which they claim to despise) just to comment sarcastically on social networks, feeding the circuits they say they hate in a horrible spiral of hypocrisy and self-referentiality. And meanwhile, we’re here, not knowing what to do and what to be but knowing very well what we would like to do and what we would have liked to be.

This was supposed to be a ZOT! review but I got carried away. It is indeed true that life sucks.