Wavves - Afraid of Heights

A thought experiment:

Assume for a second that reincarnation is literally true, and that upon his death in 1994, Kurt Cobain did not in fact attain nirvana (get it?) but was instead reincarnated into a new person.  Assuming soul turnaround time within this hypothetical scenario is fairly quick (I have to confess a decent amount of ignorance on most doctrines of reincarnation, but Live's "Lightning Crashes" at least led me to believe that it was fairly instantaneous), that new person would have entered young adulthood by now (the 19th anniversary of Cobain's death is this April 5).

In other words, he or she would be just entering an age where were they so inclined, their artistic ethos would begin manifesting itself.  Now (and I'm fairly certain this is not a part of reincarnation), what if this young person had the exact same angst, the exact same alienation, and the exact same need for self-expression that Cobain had?  What if he or she similarly turned to music to address those issues?  If Kurt Cobain was born in 1994, what would his band sound like today?

I won't presume to definitively know the answer to that question - it probably merits its own article's worth of consideration, or at least a good protracted drunken argument with a few friends - but one thing that seems quite likely is that this hypothetical band would sound quite different than Nirvana sounded on Nevermind.  They likely would not detune their guitars, they likely wouldn't fall into what we classify as grunge, and they likely wouldn't rely heavily on soft-loud-soft song structures (at least not as much as Nevermind did).  True, the next Nirvana won't sound like Nirvana because the public craves uniqueness (or at least the appearance of uniqueness) within its cultural phenomenons, but perhaps more importantly, the next Nirvana won't sound like Nirvana because the sonic blueprint they established will not be sufficient for the next iterations of Kurt Cobain.

I bring this thought experiment up because it seems to suggest two fairly self-evident truths that apply to the new album by Wavves released tomorrow entitled Afraid of Heights, which owes a huge debt to Cobain and Nirvana.  The first is that a band's impact is more than the sum of the notes they play on albums or in concert, i.e. The "Even When They Say It's All About the Music, It's Never All About the Music" Theory.  The second, related truth is that context always matters.

Wavves itself has a fairly interesting context.  Formed in 2008 in San Diego by notable slacker Nathan Williams, Wavves garnered a great deal of buzz at an incredibly early point in the band's history from hundreds of music critics whose opinions I don't respect and one or two whose opinions I do.  Before I had listened to a single note of theirs, I was familiar with Wavves as a hipster band: there was the aforementioned early buzz from places like Pitchfork, the name itself (and perhaps even more annoyingly, the fact that one of their albums is called Wavves and another Wavvves), Williams's public relationship with Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, and there was Williams's projected indifference to just about any and everything.  Wavves acted more or less like you would expect a hipper-than-thou band to act.



Being perceived as hip may or may not ultimately help a band's career, but it does unquestionably make the band into something of a symbol (i.e. something more than the sum of their music), and in this case they were a symbol that many people on the internet were more than happy to backlash against.  Williams himself did little to win over hearts and minds, generally acting like an asshole and having a drug-fueled public breakdown while onstage in Barcelona in 2009 that very nearly could have ended the band's career.  The tumult caused a band reshuffling and a stint for Williams in rehab, but the band forged ahead and released a fairly well-received album in 2010 entitled King of the Beach.

Forgetting about personal antics, musically Wavves started off playing a blend of lo-fi and surf punk that to my ears was fairly shitty.  This was not in and of itself surprising - Pitchfork lauds plenty of bands I find difficult to listen to - but what was surprising was the type of bad band Wavves were.  Usually my stereotype of hipster bands would be that they are either so twee and precious that they are entirely boring, or they are so ornate and experimental that what they produce can barely be considered music.  Wavves was different: Wavves was loud as hell.  They weren't doing anything particularly interesting with their volume, and I found them generally unlistenable, but their volume did make them stand out amongst other overhyped peers.

Now, five years after forming, Nathan Williams returns with Wavves' fourth album Afraid of Heights, and it appears that he has found something useful to do with all that noise: namely, he wants to emulate Kurt Cobain.  For the most part, this album proves successful at that: it is clearly indebted to and references Nirvana often, but it never feels overly derivative.  About five different songs on the album occasionally remind me of Nevermind's "Breed," which is probably the right formula (it also seems to suggest it has been quite a long time since I heard "Breed").  The guitars are still loud, but they are used judiciously within soft-loud-soft song structures, which, being a child of the 90's, will always work for me.  While nowhere near as funny or captivating as Cobain was, Williams uses Nirvana's sonic blueprint to explore similar angst-y self-defeating material, and the musical style and lyrical content serve each other as well here as they did back in grunge's heyday.

Still, there are many questions about this album that I am wrestling with.  What does it mean for Wavves to release an album in 2013 that sounds so similar to what Nirvana sounded like in 1992?  Is it overly hack-y and opportunistic, and how important is uniqueness in music anyway?  Does attitude and respect matter?  Wavves has never presented itself as a retro act, and Williams's general "don't give a fuck" attitude doesn't suggest someone much interested in being a curator of music of the past.  It's hard to be both intensely personal and still pay homage to musical forebears.  Does the band's new direction represent a career or a detour?

Additionally, it seems unfair to Wavves to compare them to a band with staggering importance like Nirvana. "Sounds like Nirvana" carries with it a set of expectations that can never truly be met, for those expectations are based on more than just a band's sound, and as mentioned earlier, the context will always matter, so even if a band were able to theoretically produce a Nirvana-ish album just as competent and listenable as Nevermind, the importance and the impact of that album will always fall short.  In some ways the only winning move is not to play.

But maybe all this is overanalysis.  I like the way Nirvana sounded.  Wavves' new album sounds like Nirvana, and listening to it, the transitive property does hold true: the album is an enjoyable listen.  For a band who I have disliked for the majority of their existence, that's not an insignificant achievement.

Selections
Demon to Lean On
Sail to the Sun
Beat Me Up