While talking over the phone to Nathan Williams, the 21 year old San Diegan behind Wavves, it becomes ridiculously evident just how much the internet has opened up the opportunity to have your music heard. It’s easy to picture Nathan – all flannel, upturned cap and chilled vibage – experimenting and working on his lo-fi punk behind a garage door warmed by Californian sun. I know “that garage thing’ is nothing new, but considering the sudden interest of an absurd amount of labels in Wavves, and the eruption of blog adorations that has followed, it’s kind of staggering.
“I almost thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew at first.” Nathan says, “All these labels that were asking me to do stuff were ones that I’d regularly buy from by mail order when I have a couple of dollars. So for me to say no would’ve been ridiculous, I just thought ‘whatever, I can do another record’. But then it was nine or ten records on as many different labels and I thought maybe I should stop and think things through.”
“I do once in a while get on and read those sites [blogs]. I think blogs and the internet totally changed the way music is recorded and produced. It’s so much easier and so much more accessible now. You can really just be some shithead kid in a room but as long as you can put it on the internet – which almost everyone can – and even if you don’t have the internet yourself, a friend of yours might. It’s cool in a lot of ways, but at the same time there are so many bands that you kind of have to look at a bit more closely, because I think anyone can do it now. There’ a lot more possibility for people that otherwise might never have had a chance to get it heard.”
You could probably pin some of Wavves’ success on last year’ breakthrough of No Age. Like Juan Velaquez of close LA contemporaries Abe Vigoda said in an interview last year, No Age playing on MTV is “fucking crazy”, and he’s pretty much right. While it’s not surprising these days for bands of such an unlikely aesthetic to cross over into the “mainstream” (according to more indie audiences), it’s not exactly a mean feat. Although the first self-titled Wavves cassette features similar forays into free noise/ambient as No Age’s Nouns does, but Nathan Williams is pushing lo-fi even further. Tape fuzz is his homeboy, and of course, all his gear is mostly broken.
“I was just fucking around, really. I was in this other band called Fantastic Magic, and we weren’t really doing very much at the time. The other two guys in the band both had girlfriends and there wasn’t so much concentration on what we were doing as a band. So because I was bored and I wanted to play music I just started recording my own stuff. I really had no intention of doing anything with it until another friend of mine listening to it urged me to send it around to some labels just to see what they’d say. So I sent out three or four demos and basically got three or four people that wrote back and said ‘yeah let’s do a record’. So it just filled up my time, I just started recording and doing it all and it got lots of good feedback and snowballed from there I guess.”
I’ve gotta say, listening to a track like ‘To The Dregs’ – with its Dookie nostalgic rush and skewed Brian Wilson “oooohh ooohhh” chorus – is certainly exhilarating, though it’s over way too soon at just 1:56. Wavves’ music sounds like distinct excitement mixed through pop/punk fragments. It feels like getting drunk and staring up at the sun in the daytime, a fitting type of imagery considering many have dubbed Nathan’s stuff “beach punk”. It’s pretty apt, really; it sounds just like those blurry skateboarding pictures on his releases, and also like Williams’ own pre-imagined ideas of San Diego.
“I lived in Virginia before I moved here, where I had this idea that it’s sunny all the time and there are beautiful girls dressed in next to nothing, dudes skateboarding around, and everyone is getting high, just sitting on the beach and stuff. [I had] that slacker beach town kind of idea for sure. I got here on my freshman year of high school and I kind hated it at first. It was a total culture shock, being from Virginia, which is a much smaller place. My parents had made me go to Christian school when I was younger and I finally got kicked out of that and moved to San Diego, going from having 120 people in a school to having 5000 people and not knowing a single fucking one.
“It was kind of weird at first, being the mega awkward kid. The first friends I made were just from skateboarding and hanging out. In my head though, the place was a lot different. And that’s kind of what the music I make is about; trying to convince myself that at one point in California’ history there was this incredible time and everything was like the pictures I put up on my wall.”
In terms of both West Coast DIY music and wider pop culture it’s definitely easy to romanticise a beach town like that: all palm trees and babes in bikinis, dudes smoking weed and just “having a chill time y’all”. What’s it really like these days, though?
“San Diego is a really Republican beach town. It has the second biggest army base in the US, and overall there’s a jock mentality throughout all of San Diego. Maybe six years ago there were places where you could go and play shows but now you have to play bars and they’re not really very friendly for music. People generally seem like they don’t give a shit, but this is very general what I’m saying. There is a group of kids who go out and party and go to shows and stuff. I think a lot of people who dress the part, or are down for it, just wanna go out, get fucked up and pick up a girl, rather than [go out for]just for the music or art or whatever.”
Wavves’ aesthetic combines all those faded photos and half-real nostalgias with a gritty escapism purveyed via killer punk riffs and blissed out harmonies. Even if his recording style and general approach can be pretty lax (hang out/record a punk track/have a drink/have a smoke/record a noise track), those short recording sessions are surprisingly cohesive in terms of his overall vision.
“I always thought it was really cool when a band’s aesthetic is more than just their music, it’s this whole statement, a sound and feel. It kind of all comes together somehow. In the beginning I didn’ set out thinking ‘oh, I’m going to write beach punk’ and I don’t even know why people started saying that I coined that term. I’ve never said that in my entire life. But it does make sense, I’m from the beach playing this punk-ish music, so, you know.”
Nathan listens mostly to hip-hop, and even if it’s sonically quite far from his own music, it’s an obvious informant of a certain rebellious type of scruffy pop. Wu-Tang informs his art probably just as much as old Wipers or Misfits cassettes. I guess both punk and rap both, as Nathan says, “fuck you” in various ways.
“I think there are a lot of similarities, I think about it quite a lot. People probably don’t think about it that much but the general idea is basically the same: a couple of people who are tired of taking it so they say ‘fuck you’ in whatever way that is. It’s probably at opposite ends of the spectrum the way they actually say ‘fuck you’, but it’s still a basic rebellion. Rap is just as punk as punk is a lot of the time. That’s probably why I like both of them so much. But yeah, I’m angsty at 22. Something is really wrong with me.”
Not that Wavves sounds that angsty, but there’s a nihilism to it that’s not uncommon within no-wave/DIY circles. It’s also balanced with a battered sweetness, or – at a little more of a stretch – a very grubby sort of grandeur. Nathan doesn’t seem quite as much the slacker as the media has made out though. Even with that upturned cap, the grin and the skateboard underarm, it seems like there’s at least a hint of irony to fill out these San Diegan ballads.
“Its funny, every publication that I’ve been in so far has been like ‘loser king making music’ and ‘slacker idiot’, it’s like I’m king of the losers or something,” He laughs. “I think it is one of those things where your surroundings seep in. I didn’ set out to do anything other than what I thought in my head sounded cool at the time. And once I’d recorded a couple of songs, I sat down and realized that every single song I’d written so far was all about the sun, or just about being a loser.”
“My surroundings just kind of seeped into the music. Once I’d done it a couple of times I felt I’d found a niche, for sure. I set out to work on that for the rest of the record. I like the general idea of everything so far.”
Wavves’ Self-Titled Wavvves is available through Woodsist Records.
