I hate to draw attention to the unrelenting passage of time, but King of the Beach just celebrated its 15th birthday. Wavves’ breakthrough album is nearly old enough to drive in frontman Nathan Williams’ home state of California, and its shaggy-dog slackerism has endured in the years since its release, spawning a crowd of garage-rock imitators in its wake. And while it’s easy to look back on 2010 as an indie rock fever dream sponsored by Urban Outfitters, the album’s mix of paranoia, nihilism, and despair still sounds a little radical in its reckless abandon.
Each subsequent Wavves album has been, to some degree, a response to King of the Beach—Afraid of Heights slowed its tempo; V teased out its power pop melodies; You’re Welcome returned to its producer, Dennis Herring; Hideaway experimented with its psych rock influences. But there’s only so many times one can rhyme “drinking” and “thinking” before the performance of perpetual adolescence starts to wear thin. On Spun, Wavves’ ninth record, Williams sounds like even he’s beginning to tire of his stoner schtick.
At its best, Wavves’ music vibrates with a kind of productive madness. There’s a restless creativity on early songs like “Gun in the Sun” and “Beach Goth,” the way their sparkling melodies can’t help shining through the haze of his amateur recording setup. The squeals of feedback, the unhinged screams—the strangest, and often strongest, Wavves songs sounded urgent, as if Williams had to get the hooks out of his head before they drove him insane. On Spun, by contrast, it sounds like he’s scarcely given these 13 songs a second thought, returning to the same ideas over and over again and hoping we’re too baked to notice.
It’s tempting to blame Travis Barker, who produced two songs on Spun. The blink-182 drummer is to contemporary pop-punk, in the eyes of some weary rock critics, what Jack Antonoff is to “main pop girls” like Lorde and Taylor Swift. “Leave them alone!,” I want to scream each time I see Barker’s name on yet another tracklist, whether Wavves or Sublime or Megan Fox’s newborn daughter. Since helping the artist formerly known as Machine Gun Kelly pivot from writing Eminem diss tracks to wielding an electric guitar, Barker has brought sterilized drum fills and excessive vocal processing to artists like Avril Lavigne, Willow, LilHuddy and jxdn, flattening their individual voices into a homogenous whine. It’s no different on Spun: Williams’ voice is barely legible under layers of digital distortion on the Barker-produced “Goner,” whose palm-muted guitars and egregiously tedious refrain made me wonder if it was cribbed from some MGK reject pile.
This neutered approach seeps into the rest of the album, perhaps because it was otherwise helmed (and, in his telling, essentially commissioned) by frequent blink-182 collaborator Aaron Rubin. It often sounds like they’re recording different versions of the same song: “Spun,” “Lucky Stars,” “Gillette Bayonet,” “Big Nothing,” and “Machete Bob” all begin with a filtered, quiet introduction before cranking up the volume and the power chords just in time for the first verse. Williams’ vocals sound jarringly upbeat as he sings about wanting to die after smoking weed (possibly a conflict of interest with Williams’ new cannabis company?). It’s hardly the first time Wavves has paired a bright melody with a lyric about being clinically depressed, but even the bleakness sounds like a bad Hallmark card: “Turn off the oven,” he sings on “Big Nothing,” which, as anti-suicide refrains go, is certainly no “Jumper.”
I kept waiting for the weirdo Wavves to appear—the Wavves who sampled The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” and made a psych rock record with a member of TV on the Radio. I most clearly hear it on the album’s last song, “Holding Onto Shadows.” Sweeping and far slower than anything that precedes it, it opens with soft piano, acoustic guitar, and swelling synths. Thirteen songs in, it feels like catching your breath after 40 minutes of cardio. But Spun mostly sounds like Williams running in place.
