“Laugh,” singer Nathan Williams accuses the listener on his spirited third album as Wavves, “I bet you laugh right behind my back.” He’s got reason good reason for the suspicion. The same supporters that built Williams up as one of last year’s breakthrough indie-rock artists reveled in fanning the flames of his public meltdown, quipping at videos of the apparently drugged singer as he pissed off crowds and his own band at a Barcelona music festival, forcing a cancellation of his remaining tour. The debacle played like a very small-scale version of the Kanye West/Taylor Swift uproaranother instance where a musician steadily rewarded for his impudent behavior incurred an abrupt backlash from the same public that once encouraged him.
It’s understandable, then, that Williams feels the world’s out to get him on Wavves’ new King of the Beach. “My own friends hate my guts,” he sings, and he’s not so hot on himself either. “I’m to blame, because I’m so lame,” he taunts himself, “I’m just not man enough.” That unremitting angst further aligns Williams with the disaffected snot-punk songwriters of the ’90s. Thematically, King of the Beach is a cousin to Green Day’s Dookieall drug use, alienation and counter-productive soul searchingthough musically it opts for a far more colorful palette than the monochromatic punk records of that era. Producer Dennis Herring plays Phil Spector to Williams’ Joey Ramone, bleaching clean his skuzzy arrangements and bringing once-buried power-pop hooks into the foreground (Best Coast beach queen Bethany Cosentino further freshens things up with her own feminine touch).
All the new-found prettiness gives Williams’ inner ugliness something to clash againsta clean white surface to stainand also makes a case for his songwriting better than his fuzzed-out self-recordings did. He’s still not quite the indelible talent some of his more overzealous advocates heralded last year, but he no longer seems like a flash in the pan, either.
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[Wavves’ King of the Beach is temporarily streaming here. It's available for purchase on iTunes in advance of its Aug. 3 physical release.]
