Gig: Wavves

Wavves / Ganglians / The Bitters

El Mocambo. Tuesday, September 22, 2009.

Not a gig that I was overpoweringly anticipating, but I had enough curiosity dispersed among the three acts to overcome my Tuesday night get-to-bed wishes. I was hoping that this'd at least be a relatively early night. Alas, the listed nine o'clock start time turned out to mean ten, giving some extra time to kill beforehand as the crowd in the El Mo built up.

With about four times as much stage space to spread out in compared to the last time I'd seen 'em, The Bitters sounded tighter and looked more professional.¹ The band hit the ground running playing three songs in a non-stop burst before having to stop for a tuning break and banter with the healthy-sized crowd, with plenty friends and music-scene peers right up front. The band sounded more rehearsed, and Fogel roamed the stage with a leonine swagger. Once again, I was impressed by the band's old-school rock'n'roll virtues: lean songs, harmonies, snarling guitars. And a sense that the band is having fun — at one point Ben Cook started to make fun of Wavves-man Nathan Williams' baseball cap, and Fogel snatched it off his head to wear during the next song. The tightest set of the night.

Listen to a track from this set here.

If Sacramento's Ganglians had a motto, it might be "more reverb!". I'd picked up their album, out on Woodsist, and was struck by how it had reminded me of their labelmates Woods, both bands purveying a woozy, decentred kind of psychedelia featuring a tremulous, trebly vox and plenty — plenty — reverb. Real turn off your mind, relax and float downstream stuff. I wasn't fully satisfied with the album, but it did leave me with the sense that this band had something going for it. And, indeed, experienced live, the band proved themselves to be an interesting proposition. Although the elements of their sound — esp. those keening, warbling vox — remained constant, the band managed to show a range of ideas that kept things entertaining throughout the half-hour set. Credit the drummer, whose jaunty backbeat did the most from transforming these songs from the folksy meadow rambles on the album to the full-blooded lurches on the stage. It even managed to make me feel mildly woozy and fuzzy-headed — in a rather pleasant way — with the songs getting better as the set progressed,² and I don't think that was just the beer poured into a skipped-supper empty stomach. A strong live showing.

Listen to a track from this set here.

I must confess I came in never having heard anything from Wavves³, knowing Nathan Williams mostly by reputation for the wave of tabloid-y headlines he'd coasted to town on — and, indeed was, on this night, cruising towards. Still wearing a cast from a wrist broken in a skateboarding accident and with a tour-ravaged voice, the youthful singer was showing the effects of fast livin', but still able to put on a show. Playing as a duo, with Williams on guit and vox, accompanied by Zach Hill on pummelling drumage. The latter added most of the show's visual flair, playing with a frenetic, heavy metal intensity, hair flying and sticks a blur. The music was basic rudimentary noisy punk, tho not without some melodic smarts — enough, perhaps, that some of the songs would have stood on their own, without his guit being sheathed in layers of distortion and his vox swathed in reverb — but such was is chosen m.o. Which isn't totally anything to complain about — I do likes me noisy little pop nuggets when they're done well, and Williams had a respectable batting average.

Not bad for a youngster (a fresh-faced 22) still learning his craft. Watching the show, I was thinking some about the weird times of instant hype we live in, and how a guy like this can rise out of obscurity pretty quickly. Would his work be better if he had some more time to refine it in the minors, as it were, before getting called up to the bigs? And the flipside of the coin is the sheer randomness of this sort of hype. The young man is not untalented, sure, but there's no shortage of acts in this city (or in a bunch of other cities, I'd guess) that are at the same level and mining the same vein. Which is to say, if this was a local act that you saw in your local dive, it'd feel kinda cool and special; as an international touring sensation it feels mildly like a backlash-inviting put-on. A matter of perspective, I suppose, and maybe it just exposes me, in this internet age, as a sort of fuddy-duddy with a parochial bent for thinking that, these days, geography matters.

Ah well. It was an okay set, and there were a reasonable number of young folks there who well into it. If this is their gateway into a love affair with noisy little pop nuggets, then ought I complain?⁴ A short-ish, half hour set, plus one song encore and then the night was done. Overall, a decent night, if not revelatory.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ How professional? "Since the last show, we did a Nike commercial, and then Ben and Jonah won the Polaris award," vocalist Aerin Fogel casually tossed off between songs. In the ensuing collective discussion of how the Polaris is not such a big deal, the words "Nike commercial" were otherwise ignored. Whether this was a true fact or a jape, it's eyebrow-raising, in a way — in the past, a band like this would have said something of this sort to get a rise out a crowd, to act as if they'd sold out. Or, I suppose, to indicate that they had, in fact, sold out. But now, it's just another bit of info, and was received by the audience without comment. This is how the culture has shifted.

² Including one song that borrowed quite liberally from The Clash's "Car Jamming", of all things.

³ Pronounced like waves.

⁴ Though, speaking about the kids and me as an old fuddy-duddy, I was less than impressed with some of the crowd's concert decorum. By the end of the night, the floor was covered with no small amount of broken glass from people having finished their beers and whatnot and just setting them down on the floor for other people to kick about — a potentially dangerous situation when a lot of these same people are semi-moshing around and bouncing off each other. Is it so difficult for people to get that when you buy a drink, you're responsible for the container? If people lack a sense of how their actions impact on others and can't keep up with this minor sort of social obligation, what hope do we have for dealing with some of the big problems that we collectively face? I despair, some times, I tells you.