Wavves – Wavvves

Once the hype machine roars to life, it’s nearly impossible to ignore. Either you the spectator are borne up in its jaws, clamped irreversibly, or, arms akimbo, you stand and squint skeptically at all the chrome and gears. The poor Nathan Daniel Williams, sole member of Wavves, is clenched tight in this monster’s gnarled fist. A dewy 22 years of age, Williams is already on album number two and is wading over to album three.

So what can you expect when you take a former record store clerk with a sincere affection for rap and give him some dinky instruments to putter around with? Well, uh, not this, and what a relief. Sounding a heckuva lot more like Ariel Pink’s kid brother than Lil’ Wayne’s, Wavves fits in beautifully with his avant/ fuzzy contemporaries. This time around, there’s even more of the cochlea-detonating racket that made him famous. “So Bored” and “No Hope Kids” stand out for their gratifyingly simple melodic structure (and the former got covered by Vivian Girls at South by Southwest). Mostly, though, the tunes are bizarre gluts of evocative noise, layered with vocals that swing between a falsetto and a sunny smudge. Certainly the names are appropriate: “Goth Girls” really does sound like lady nightcrawlers in the crosshairs of club strobe lights, and “Beach Goth” conjures the hilarious image of a pasty teen assaulted by the brightness as he crosses the dunes.

In regards to that evil, lumbering hype machine mentioned above, Wavvves seems like an album knee-deep in the temptation cornucopia that GarageBand provides. But that’s the awkward first listen; the next few couplings between you and this record get progressively better. Once you’ve slouched more deeply into its heavy Californian haze, the sound evolves into an engrossing and woolly miasma you can really dig your toes into. For maximum enjoyment, make sure you’ve got an orange soda in one hand and a roach in the other.