REVIEW: Wavves "Wavves"

Rating: 5.5

Critics have accurately identified a few musical archetypes over the relatively brief course of contemporary pop music.  The Tortured Poet (Townes Van Zandt - Elliot Smith) The Rock-n-Roll Bad Boy (take your pick) and so on.  Allow me to add The Incorruptible Garage Band.  Blame Nirvana, the Ramones, whoever, but a formula has developed wherein energetic young people of varying skill levels gather in the home, exercise their first amendment rights to rock the fuck out and eventually land a record deal which includes a lifetime of opportunities to sell out.  It's the American dream, really.

For this particular archetype talent is no substitute for playing loud and fast on a self-financed collection of beat up instruments, blown amps and fried wires.  But even if it's about the sizzle and not the steak you still have to have a fire.  And a steak.    The Incorruptible Garage Band can't afford steak, they're on a popcorn budget, but rather than pop it up nice and salty over a roaring fire Wavves put the jiffy-pop in the microwave - all stupid sparks and loud noises.  It's a little bit of masochistic fun but in the end you're left with a sputtering mess and nothing to chew on, just a ruined microwave and the smell of burnt popcorn.

REVIEW: Girls "Album"

Rating: 5.5

To paraphrase Girls' growing mythology, frontman Christopher Owens was raised in a cult that scared away his father, pimped out his mother, and allowed his brother to die as a baby.  Owens teen-tramped his way to a cozy spot under the wing of a Texas millionaire then ended up in San Francisco where he and band-mate Chet White recorded Album under the influence of an entire pharmacy.  It's the soundtrack to a movie I would never watch.

Let me walk that back a few steps.  Album is not bad.  It is not distasteful or poorly executed, unoriginal or listless.  It's a decent rock record full of moody little DIY tunes including stand-out single "Hellhole Ratrace."  It's believable and at times charming, never over-reaching in concept or execution.  Their sound is something like Elvis Costello singing Beach Boys songs through the lens of Hardcore-era Pulp.  But Costello is best when he's howling for the cheap seats, Pulp played real perversion like a bawdy joke and The Beach Boys - now over-referenced icons of sun-emo* jangle-pop - were ultimately 1960's snapshot storytellers and merchants of Americana just like Warhol and his silk-screened soup cans.  Girls choose to moan when they might howl, leer when they might wink and blur their captured images in favor of form over subject.  Album fails to provide the ecstatic release or profound realization needed to either overcome or earn its own icky origins or set them apart from their heroes and peers.

Sadly I won't be surprised to hear one day that Owens died prematurely of his own instability, and that would be too bad.  Everyone deserves a second chance and this seems to be his so I really hope it works out.  Also sadly, I am all but certain that Girls and Album will evaporate into pop culture's easily erased digital memory before you can say Arctic Monkeys.

* sunny + emotive = sun-emo.  I just made that up.