Wavves - King of the Beach (album review)

Oh Nathan Williams, I'm fucking jealous of you man. You're younger than I am by a few years, and you've already recorded an album in your bedroom at your parents house, toured said album, had a drug induced 'meltdown' onstage – actually less of a meltdown and more of a kid with a guitar being a kid with a guitar - and fought one of the Black Lips; just a few of the things I was hoping to accomplish at this stage in my life. Not everybody sees these accomplishments as accolades however, and there's a considerable public and media escalated backlash against the guy as a person. So with all of this activity in the public, what's the best thing the Wavves frontman can do? Probably play guitar really loud, sing even louder, hire Jay Reatards rhythm section to beat the shit out of their instruments, and then just hammer it into everyone's head that all you want to do is have fun at the fucking beach. And what's so wrong with that? Fuck it, I wish I was at the beach right now. In the short period of time that he's been active as Wavves he has not only alienated people with his behaviour, he's divided the music community with his over-use of the gain knob and repetitious melodies. Here, he's proving the naysayers wrong by bringing out a sarcasm and new-found confidence that wasn't wholly present on the previous album, being more liberal with his use of gain, and kicking the songwriting up a notch.

So let's start off with the idea that King of the Beach is packed with happy-go-lucky 'I just drank a 40 and grabbed my skateboard' melodies that would fit right in with people who aim to do just that. The self titled track is literally about feeling like a king on the beach, capping it off with a chorus of “you're never gonna stop me”. Next-up, Super Soaker gets kind of angsty, but by the time Idiot comes on he's laughing it off, “I'm not supposed to be a kid / but I'm an idiot / I'd say I'm sorry / but it wouldn't mean shit.” It sounds negative on paper, but he fires the lines off with an attitude that keeps it feeling too upbeat and sarcastic to be heavy; maintaining a positive mood that carry's over the entire album.

That positive mood comes in a few flavours here. While on the last release the standout tracks were the ones where Williams had tackled the cut-time pop-punk vibe with swagger (yeah, fucking swagger), here even the tracks that would have been a noise mess - like 'goth girls' on the last album – are replaced by refined reverb-y pop happiness. It's the type of shit that would fit in perfectly on a newer Raveonettes album. When Will You Come, while not the strongest of tracks on the album, plays homage to the old Spector / Beach Boys big-slow drumbeat (it almost feels like a rite of musical passage for borrowing so much from them). Baseball Cards feels like some sort of blissful drug induced nostalgia of a childhood love that only he ever had, but at the same time it's something we've all experienced. He sings “I don't wanna walk outside” over and over again, and while he does cap it off with “without you” at the end of the song, it's almost unnecessary; we already knew.

I don't care which side of the Wavves hate train you're on; if you already love Wavves, cool, you already know this album pretty much capped off your summer perfectly, you know what's up. However, to the people who hate, the people who fail to acknowledge the gain knob as a lifestyle choice: it's only a matter of time.