The Brag

Wavves
King Of The Beach
By Nathan Jolly

Nathan Williams is awfully prolific for an artist who has the term ‘slacker’ attached to his every movement. Under the moniker Wavves, he’s cranked out three albums of vaguely surfy, vaguely skatey pop in under three years, in addition to a bunch of impressively regular standalone singles. His first two albums were recorded into the inbuilt microphone on a Macbook Pro, and sound just as you would expect – but the fuzz and lo-fidelty couldn’t hide Williams’ inherent songwriting skill, and it wasn’t long before the blog world took notice. The albums conveniently hooked into the lo-fi renaissance of the past few years, with lyrics that fed into the nostalgia of the times, while focusing on a rose-coloured present than past.

Wavves’ third album, however, was a (comparatively) hi fidelity blast of SoCal pop punk, closer to Green Day’s Dookie than the noise acts to which Williams was previously compared. The album was spliced with surf-waltzes, experiments in production and other excursions in sound that ensured the critics wouldn’t dismiss him as a one-note lo-fi artist. King Of The Beach was brash, bratty and clever, and it propelled Williams and his band into international tours – but when we speak, Williams is in Wyoming, with bad reception caused by his tour bus “going between a bunch of snowy mountains.”

“It’s been long, it’s been cold – it’s kinda warming up, which is good.” Nathan Williams clearly doesn’t enjoy touring. He attempts to half-heartedly explain how having friends on the tour with him makes it all worthwhile (his three-piece backing band and his girlfriend, Bethany Cosentino from California’s Best Coast, are accompanying this trip), but it’s clearly a front. And it’s not long before he unleashes. “As much as I wanna give it up a lot of the time – it’s tough, you get tired, and you’re cranky and you’re hungry – you show up to the venue, and it’s like everything’s suddenly changed. People come up to me with t-shirts they’ve made or pictures of my cat. It’s pretty incredible.”

Wavves and Best Coast are intrinsically linked, thanks to Williams’ very public relationship with Cosentino. Where Cosentino has spent the last week enduring a horror run of Australian journalists asking trite fan-pop questions, Williams is at ease discussing his cat and his love affair with marijuana, which has seen his merch desk recently swell with patrons. “Yeah, i’m selling [branded] rolling papers and grinders,” he says. “They sell like hotcakes. Pretty incredible. Sometimes I think kids just buy them to collect them and have them, because it doesn’t seem like they smoke weed at all. I think they just kinda like them.”

In fact the subject of weed pops up a lot through the interview, and the latest video for title track ‘King Of The Beach’ features a golden joint, a glittery, bejewelled bong, a shot of his Wavves grinder and numerous other references to the drug (plus an adorable cameo from Cosentino’s cat, Snacks, who Letterman recently name-checked in one of the odder collisions of the blogosphere and late-night television). While Cosentino seems to be trying to distance herself from the stoner/slacker tag (albeit after spending the best part of two years cultivating the image…), Williams seems to relish the reference point. The cover to King Of The Beach features a stoned cat holding a joint, a weed leaf and a clear statement of intent; his latest foray, a Wavves-branded baseball cap complete with obligatory weed-leaf on the side, is even less subtle.

Unfortuantely, Australian fans hoping to purchase these psychotropic products at the upcoming Wavves shows might be caught up in bureaucracy. “We’d like to airmail the grinders and the papers out to Australia, but it’s all up in the air at the moment. It’s the most efficient way to do it and I think it’d be cool. I can’t think of a better way to go about it.” (Williams trepidation is understandable – Last November in Germany, at a routine traffic stop, Williams was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana. He spent some time in a cell and was fined 200 Euros.)

Talk turns to his upbringing as a “musical kid,” in the disparate musical landscape that was California in the late ‘90s. As with a lot of the mish-mashing indie artists these days, this jarring amalgamation seems to have shaped his fusion of SoCal pop punk, cassette culture, cartoons, skateboarding and ‘60s girl-group pop. “My parents listen to a lot of great old music, and they were in a band together. I liked all types of music, from grunge to hip hop to punk to stuff in my parents collection. I picked up guitar at 13, and just started.”

Williams played in various high school bands before launching his solo project – a process that seems to have happened less through design than boredom. “You just make music, that’s what you do. You write songs and record them. It’s fairly natural.” This is also the vague reasoning he gives for King Of The Beach’s stylistic gear change. “It’s not really deliberate, it’s just moving on, trying something new,” he explains. “It’s not that I didn’t like what I was doing. You get tired of doing the same thing, you wanna expand. It’s just natural.” Not surprisingly, Williams has another sonic shift in mind for album four. “We can probably talk about that in a few months,” he says hesitantly, “but I’m trying to keep it under wraps. I think you’re really going be surprised by what’s coming next.”

What: King of the Beach is out now on Fat Possum, through Shock
Where: Manning Bar, Sydney Uni
When: Wednesday March 9