Today, we’re at least partially about the 90s throwbacks.
[Video][Website]
[4.55]
Josh Langhoff: And if Nirvana is 7, if Nirvana is 7, if Nirvana is 7, then these guys are
[5]
Brad Shoup: It’s on me to check, but maybe the folks jazzed about the Wavves/Surfer Blood revivalism took the deep end into account. Cobain is still our great destruction myth, so any salvage job has to include his bends. “Afraid of Heights” has the great deliberate melodic bits: a little Nirvana, a little On Avery Island. That it’s so refractive may mean that the biographical lesson is learned. As for the composition… the “whoo”s are sung like gulps from a canteen, but the piano is killing major time. So… not even close.
[5]
Alfred Soto: The cross-dressing saga in the video is more harrowing than the tune, which after plodding through three minutes of standard issue chords devolves into echo-laden ponderousness. About that video…let’s just say that fans with memories of the shitstorms kicked up by The Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct will recognize the hash it makes of sexual politics.
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: Nathan Williams sings “got nothing to lose,” but this is pretty much as safe a song he could make as Wavves. It seems a little predictable to bring weed into this, but Williams himself isn’t afraid to spark (heh) that conversation here. So this is languid and cloudy and too chilled out for its own good, not a bad song but unambitious for a guy who has shown moments of intrigue in the past.
[5]
Ian Mathers: There’s sludgy in a good way, and then there’s stuff like this; I don’t want to use the descriptor because there’s plenty of music I’m damning by association, but this pile of turgid slop really does seem like a bunch of sludge. Damn it, again, that description makes “Afraid of Heights” seem way less colourless and boring than it is. Then there’s the video, which is offensive bullshit in a bunch of ways in the service of… what, exactly? Extra points off for marrying the worst part of the video to a coda that’s even more lifeless and awful than the first three and a half minutes of the song (and tossed off crap like this shouldn’t make it past two and a half minutes in the first place).
[0]
Jonathan Bogart: Last month I compared the new Strokes record to Weezer; I hereby retract that comparison in order to stick it here. I clearly had no idea how much gravitational attraction the blue album still wields.
[4]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Of course Rich Costey mixed this. “Afraid of Heights” may have been written by Nathan Williams for the sole purpose of getting Rich Costey (a Very Big Rock Guy lest you forgot) to make it shine as bright and as loud as any alt-rock feel bad hit of the summer. It is a monster of a song, its dozy tumbles through alcoholic loneliness slowly morphing into an indignant defiance of loneliness. “I’ll always be on my own!” Williams drawls over and over, the power of the performance making it as cathartic a car singalong as it is a bedroom-bound bummer-out. The antsy discursion at the end stretches on too long but when you deliver a slam-dunk sadsack monster like this, you have been given the license to indulge your goofy space rock discursions. “Nothing to prove,” Williams sings as the interlude circles the drain, and he’s right about that.
[8]
Jer Fairall: I’ve ignored their previous records partially on the grounds of the stories about obnoxious off- (and occasionally on-) stage behaviour but mostly because the band name and the timing of their breakthrough record suggested more tedious, slacker-y chillwave. It turns out this is much more slacker of the 1994 variety, but not enough, ironically, that he can’t manage at least two awesome buzzsaw guitar riffs (one buried deep enough in the mix that you might need multiple listens to catch it), a vocal that, for all of his put-upon sneering, can’t hide the aching vulnerability of its sentiment and a spacey little comedown of an outro. Minor demerits only for the wasteful misuse of Jenny Lewis; apparently, she’s in here somewhere.
[7]
Anthony Easton: I love this, maybe because I am a sucker for the odd Jesus reference, or because the guitars convince me that I might at some point understand rock and roll. Perhaps it’s because the woohoos are pure joy and the lyrics aren’t, or maybe because it’s been an emo couple of weeks, but it’s kind of fantastic.
[7]
Sabina Tang: I’d received the impression (from Hipster Runoff years ago, granted) that Wavves put out enervated music that made an intentional cult of not living up to standards. This starts as a blast of noise pop that, if left-field of joyful, is certainly not enervated; but it runs long, and the lyrics do make an intentional cult of not living up to standards. I would’ve given it a [6] if it were 2 minutes 30 seconds, and if the video didn’t really bother me quite a lot.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: So this is, what, two years to Peak Rivers Cuomo?
[2]