When Wavves came to Wesleyan for Spring Fling in 2011, it was on the heels of its most successful album to date, King of the Beach. The album, one of my personal all-time favorites, exhibited frontman Nathan Williams charming the ass off of anyone who would listen with his juvenile, unabashedly angst-ridden lyrics, lightened and familiarized by some of the simplest yet most memorable beach-bum melodies in recent history. In addition to his California surferboy drawl, Williams had his own no-nonsense punk guitar parts and drummer Billy Hayes’ absolutely energizing playing to thank for the record’s overwhelming success.
With the release of its newest album, Afraid of Heights, the Wavves of 2013 has much of the same energy and style that is so easy to love, which is fantastic considering their signing to a major record label. However, with the understatedly intricate production that such a label deal allowed, the band is often wasted on sub-par songwriting throughout the album.
That isn’t to say that this album is lacking a few good earworms. On the first half of the album especially, Wavves confirms its acute ability to craft classically catchy two- and three-chord songs. Indeed, several of these songs sound like they very well could have been on their previous release, if not for the much more complex, nuanced production. Such studio wizardry is the result of the band’s top-40s producer John Hill, and it shows itself in the form of precise waves of feedback, momentously sculpted swells of ambiguous instrumentation, and pristinely recorded cellos and violins. The album’s opener, “Sail to the Sun,” begins with a xylophone-heavy orchestral loop that serves as a beautiful, dreamlike prologue, quite approximately seeming to lift the listener into the sun-drenched clouds. The emergence of a thudding bass drum signals that this scenic imagery won’t last for long, and, within a split second, the full band kicks in with a smack in the face of punky joy that could elicit either arm-swinging dance moves or full-throttle head banging, or perhaps both.
The second track, “Demon to Lean On,” brings the band back to the ground, beginning with a Nirvana-derived three-note acoustic guitar riff that rolls until the distortion kicks back in and Williams moans, “holding a gun to my head / so send me an angel / or bury me deeply instead / with demons to lean on.” Though a swell is enough tune to blast in speakers or well-equipped headphones, the track would surely be best heard live—one can’t help but immediately flash back to the sunny majesty of Spring Fling 2011. With Foss season on the near horizon, this is one song that you can certainly expect to hear blasting on the hill this spring.
The album continues onward without much tonal diversity, and when it does change pace, it either sounds out-of-place or shockingly dull. The stupefying lo-fi boredom of “Mystic” makes it a good candidate for worst cut of the record, providing none of the interesting production, catchy melodiousness, or visceral excitement that made the first two songs so excellent. And when the album’s title track meanders its way out with a spacey outro built on dissonant chords, one might marvel at the peculiarities of the sound’s arrangement and mastering but is mostly just left to wonder how anyone involved with this record possibly could have thought it made sense to put the segment where they did.
Fortunately, the enhanced production quality on this release does find moments of greatness. For one, during the bridge of the otherwise underwhelming “Cop,” bashing drums, reverberating vocal coos, soaring guitar textures, and a playful whistling melody converge into a pinnacle of massive destruction that makes way for a final hurried refrain. On “Everything is My Fault,” a doorbell-sounding loop serves as the static basis for a spacey, open-ended acoustic slow jam that features Williams going into a creepy, nasally high register that we don’t often hear from the singer. The cinematic largesse of this cut, along with the more out-there aural space it inhabits, signals one possible model for a new creative direction in Wavves’ future.
And that is just what they are going to need, because, as most of the songs on the second half of this album unfailingly prove, there is a limit to what this band can do with their present aesthetic. King of the Beach had very few weak tracks, but this release has more. Without some major changes to their process, I don’t expect Wavves will be able to maintain its excitable fan base so easily. Afraid of Heights is an immaculate-sounding record with superb energy, several fantastic moments, and some all-around great songs. But the tedious similarities that link many of the songs, especially on the tail end of the album, signal that, after the catchiness fades away, listeners are going to need something more from this outfit in future releases. However, until then, you can expect to have a lot of fun blasting this album on Foss this spring and on your favorite sunny beach this summer.
