Newspaper Page Text
MELISSA STETTON
frotn the QgJrovh*
to the ityh*
With
uzz-skuzz buzz band Wawes is just
some regular-guy dude from San Diego
who smokes weed, wakes up late, rides
^ his skateboard and tries to catch old-
ass Garfield cartoons in the wee hours, or at
least that's the impression he gives off; he's
West Coast chill and sings about it. Watching
Nathan Williams in his music video for "No
Hope Kids," filmed during his world tour, it
is easy to imagine him a picaresque hero,
getting wasted and playing shows, unwit
tingly implicated in the machinations of blog
hype and Internet coolhunting. In less than
two years, he's released two albums and a
bevy of cassettes, and has endured the hype
and backlash waves of fickle music listeners.
Already, he's in the redemption phase. Most
importantly, Wawes is the paradigm for a new
kind of alternative band made on the Internet
and in bedrooms.
Wawes was the bedroom pop project
of one Nathan Williams (age 23): now the
epitome of "Gorilla v. Bear" blog hype, don't-
take-too-much-X-before-playing-stadiums
advice from your mom and the poster boy for
the no-fi genre. Wawes also now includes the
hardest working drummer in showbiz, Zach
Hill.
Williams' music probably hinges on an
impossibility: if you were to ever try playing
a scratched Smiley Smile bootleg LP through a
line-out connected to an amp that's stuck in
overdrive since you found it at some garage
sale, the output would sound something like
shit, but it'd also, maybe, reach that equilib
rium of vaguely tuneful/ groggy pixilation/
distortion noise that Wawes has adopted as
his own.
He's not the only one: Why is everyone and
their mom in a lo/no-fi band these days?
"I don't know," he says, laughing. "Maybe
because it's easy to do, it's easy to record, and
it doesn't really cost money. But I'm not sure.
I wouldn't say I'm any scene in particular, I'm
just labeled that." At 21, after quitting his
day job, Williams spent a month making ram
shackle home recordings in GarageBand that
would become his first two albums. Through
the course of those two DIY releases, titled
Wawes and Wawves, he has explored kinda
sad themes like ennui, stupid sub-cultures and
drug freakouts, titling his songs plainly "So
Bored," "California Goth" and "Weed Demon."
Simple and wide-eyed, it's his pseudo-adoles
cent, bratty Brian Wilson-isms and up-Beat-
Happening-floor-tom pop that transforms such
drab subject matter into optimistic Stoner
anthems.
It wouldn't be reductive to say Wawes has
tapped into the cool Zeitgeist where every
one has a fuzzy bedroom pet project, where
everyone has a little too much consonance in
their name (see UUWWWZ, Lowers, Nodzzz),
and where no one can really play their instru
ments. Perhaps most significant of this new
rockist narrative is that "overnight success"
is a literalism—relative popularity is instan
taneous and measured by a new temporality
called "blog years," an ADD blank (screen)
generation eye-blink test, akin to a "light
year." The short incubation period from obscu
rity to hypeblogged to Pitchfork Best New
Music wunderkind to backlash only magnifies
that most of these bands can't perform live.
When Williams first started playing live shows
last spring, he sucked. His inexperience
reached a tipping point during his so-called
"meltdown" at the Primavera Sound Festival
in May where he took a cocktail of ecstasy,
Valium and Xanax, harassed the audience and
was booed off stage.
"When I first started playing, the first
couple of shows were with 500 people, so I
just got thrown into it and I didn't have any
time to work the set out with somebody and
practice and play smaller shows for a while. It
just kinda blew up so quickly, and I was play
ing for tons of people right away, so it wasn't
necessarily very good in the very beginning.
There was stuff to work out, and it's just like
with anything, you do it enough and you get
better at it," he says.
Since then, Wawes has played to glow
ing live reviews and plenty of redemption
feature stories. And with a new album already
recorded, it seems he's about go through it
all over again. Whether he'll be relevant a few
years from now is anyone's guess, but if he
can write 15 stuck-in-your-head melodies in a
month, I'd go with longevity. Either way, he's
down for the ride, one that hopefully includes
munchies. I'll leave you with Williams' last
words:
"I'm sorry, I have to go, we're pulling up to
the Burger King right now!"
Christopher Benton
f —— j 'N
WHO: Dan Deacon, Wawes, Ganglians,
Nuclear Power Pants
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Saturday, Oct 3
HOW MUCH: $12 (adv.)
L
Dos Equis
Dos Equis
Mon, Wed, Thurs
Dos Equis & Other Specials
thr. wef’kmid 1 Omit
SEPTEMBER 30, 2009 • FLAGP0LE.COM 19