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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2009 > October > 12 > Entry
Live Review: Wavves at Emo’s
“III’m sooo booored/Liiife’s aaa chooore,” sang Nathan Williams of the punk duo Wavves, drawing out each word for maximum slacker effect, occasionally interjecting pop sheen in the form of adoring coos sung like a one-man trio of female backing singers. The echo-chamber filter on his mic made the lyrics to the song, “So Bored,” practically inaudible against his trashy, distorted guitar and Zach Hill’s death-defying drumming. The moshpit didn’t seem to mind, though, raising crowd-surfers time and again.
Williams leads anything but a bored life. Last month, he got in a fight with a member of the Black Lips, setting the Pitchfork/blogger set afire. The backlash against Williams has been harsh, as if people forget he’s a 23-year-old kid trying to live up to the hype of a zealously critical world.
Deserved buzz for Wavves’s second album, an exuberantly messy, fuzzed-out, no-fi collection quizzically titled “Wavvves,” paved the way for Williams and Hill’s Saturday headlining gig at Emo’s. Was the reason hardly anyone was there because the Black Lips played Austin the night before, and the town’s indie rock allegiance was pledged to that camp?
All apologies. You missed out. A 45-minute set of Liars and No Age in the speed of Minor Threat could have been yours. Silver bullets about goths, demons, and apathy: “To the Dregs,” “California Goths,” and “No Hope Kids,” among those songs. It was an all-at-once, all-the-time assault on almost every three-minutes-or-less song.
One of the two new songs they played showed why Hill will be the best off-season acquisition this side of Brett Favre. He was a human strobe light on the unidentified song’s gonzo drum-solo outro, endorphin-releasing, eye-tripping stuff that would make John Bonham combust. Hill transformed Williams’s lackadaisical step-offs into all-out thrashes, and built Williams’s street cred in the process.
The other new song, “Hula Hoop,” was a jackhammer head-bopper wherein Williams responded seemingly to all the attention he’s been getting, with the refrain “Going insane, going insane, going insane/And I can’t take it.” At least that’s what it sounded like in the echo chamber.
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