Wavves - No Hope Kids

Wavves “No Hope Kids” from Pete Ohs on Vimeo.

A fair whack of this was shot in Dublin, more specifically backstage and outside Whelans. You can also see Nathan hanging out with Pens and their mates somewhere near the beginning. Pens are well worth checking out if you already haven’t done so… They have an album out sometime later this year on DE STIJL RECORDS called ‘Hey friend, what you doing?’.

Wavves

Illustration by Amelia Braekke-Dfyer (also in a brilliant band, Pens).

“It’s the only way I knew how to record the songs basically. I liked the way it sounded when I first did it, so I just kept doing it.” Nathan Williams, aka Wavves, will not be drawn on the topic of a ‘lo-fi aesthetic’. Based in San Diego and aligned with the all-ages noise/punk scene out of LA’s The Smell venue (answerable for No Age and The Mae Shi amongst others), his music is of the blown-out speaker variety. The guitars and drums are as distorted as each other, and when the fuzzy vocals pop out of the mix for long enough to be audible, the words belie a particular type of skater/stoner nihilism. On Beach Demon, a recent 7” single, the chorus consists of the phrase “going nowhere” repeated. The flipside of that disc, Weed Demon, is much along the same lines, as the title suggests.

Not for him the sunny outlook of some of his fellow Californians either. “It’s actually all pretty depressing,” he says, “but that’s kind of what I wanted to do, write depressing pop songs”. That’s as good a description as you will ever hear of Wavves, skirting the line between the noise-pop of Times New Viking and other, gloomier reaches of the lo-fi world.

And, much the same as Times New Viking, Wavves are currently basking in the radiance of critical praise, in print media and on blogs alike. At times, the positivity has been effusive, even overblown. I ask if he has ever read anything particularly ridiculous about himself. “People say stupid shit all the time, that’s just what happens. I don’t really dwell on that stuff because you just gotta have fun, you know?”

Fun is something the twenty-two year old has down to a science on his singles, but on his self-titled debut LP, there is a surprising amount of breathing room between breakneck surf-punk lo-fi trash songs. “I think the songs connect in a really interesting way. It’s not what most people would expect, but if you actually listen to the album front to back, some of the atmospheric or spacey more textured tracks add so much to it.”
Even so, the album flies by almost in a blur. And there is another record due in March, bearing the same title as the first but with one extra v (‘Wavvves’). With a full-length cassette already in the catalogue and a whole bundle of 7” singles due, Williams is proving impressively prolific. Does he work very quickly? “It’s always different. I try and fool around with the guitar as much as possible because songs just come easier that way. Then when I actually record the song I kind of mould it a little more. “

Aside from being Wavves, Williams maintains a blog and a label under the name Ghost Ramp. Ghost Ramp the label was set up to release the music of Wavves and friends, but it has been discontinued due to being “a burden on relationships”. The blog, however, is alive and well, functioning both as a tour diary and news site for the band, as well as a place to collect YouTube videos of Sonic Youth, ECW wrestling, Billy Corgan and an ever-building amount of classic hip-hop. If an encyclopaedic knowledge of rap music is a something you would not expect to find in a purveyor of trashy lo-fi, maybe it should not be so surprising. The dusty, distorted aesthetic is something that has found much more mainstream acceptance in hip-hop circles than in guitar music. And, truth be told, it doesn’t seem like Nathan Williams puts a lot of thought into what he should and shouldn’t be doing. He just does it if it seems like he should.

One final question then. Why two Vs in Wavves? “Just because.” There you have it, ladies and gentlemen.

Wavves plays upstairs in Whelans on February 11th, Tickets €10 (+booking fee).