Wavves: Spun Album Review | Pitchfork

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.