Oh My Rockness

We love Wavves! It's a messy, fuzzy, lo-fi, wonderful, chaotic, happy, muddled and absolutely fascinating melodious affair. Wavves is the wickedly warbled work of San Diego's Nathan Williams, a young man who knows how to write and record a killer melody on what must be a shoestring budget.

Think of Wavves as a nice compliment to what fellow noisy lo-fi California kids like No Age and HEALTH are rocking, if you need that contemporary band comparison fix. But there's something a little less aggressive going on here.

Sure, Wavves songs sometimes explode into an abrasive avalanche of reverb, feedback and other discordant disarray (in a bedroom recorded sort of way), but the sound assaults somehow make you stand tall with a smile plastered on your face, instead of lowering your head and sullenly lifting your fists.

What it comes down to are solid little melodies. Williams can bury them in the most distorted of sonic layers, but an accessible song structure is still able to shine through the chaos. And the listener is left with a most beautiful mess.