Available on: Fat Possum LP

After a very public meltdown at last year’s Primavera Sound festival, Nathan Williams has taken a long hard look in the mirror and returned not only with the finest Wavves album to date, but with a record that on first listens threatens to secure a place in the canon of scuzzy surf pop alongside Dick Dale, The Dictators and Pixies.

A more mature and coherent Williams is joined for the first time by ex-Jay Reatard band members, Stephen Pope (bass) and Billy Hayes (drums), both of whom contribute songs to the album, even if Wavves remains very much Williams’s baby. Producer Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse / Counting Crows / The Hives) has given the group’s lo-fi sound a bit of a radio-friendly polish, and there is nothing as immediately avantgarde as ‘Goth Girls’ or ‘Killer Punx, Scary Demons’ off the last LP, Wavvves.

Yet by letting a little sunshine, and a little more melody into their dirty world, Wavves have become a much stronger proposition than the willful shitgazers of yore. Not that Nathan Williams has lost his sense of disgust, with lines such as “I bet you laugh right behind my back…I’d say sorry but it wouldn’t mean shit” (‘Idiot’) and “I hate myself man, but who’s to blame? I guess I’m just fucked up or too insane” (‘Take on the world’). It’s just that these barbs sit in the middle of some of the hookiest punk surf pop you’re ever likely to hear.

The title track is a prime example: a revenge fantasy for the kid who got sand kicked in his face set against a driving power pop landscape with a psych twist.The cutely-titled ‘Super Soaker’ is one of several tracks that uses Williams’s amazing falsetto to great effect. In this case, it provides the same kind of aural chiaroscuro that Nirvana achieved by contrasting a quiet verse with a loud chorus, only by contrasting a regularly-sung verse with a falsetto chorus.

Falsetto harmonies add much to both ‘Take on the World’ and ‘When will you Come?’  The latter, a surf ballad with sleigh bells and prominent keyboard is as much Beach House as Beach Boys. The album’s other slowies are also among its best numbers: ‘Green Eyes’ is a touching outsider’s love song (“My own friends hate my guts, so what, who gives a fuck? / Green eyes, I’d run away with you”), while ‘Baseball Cards’, a swoonsome pop song in the tradition of ‘Caroline No’ and ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’, features handclaps, finger snaps, gorgeous melodies and a kids’ chorus. Fabulous.

Williams’s new bandmates add further variation to proceedings with their compositions. Pope’s ‘Linus Spacehead’ is a nice slice of pop punk with analogue burbles, while Hayes contributes two numbers with more than a hint of Grandaddy about them – the quirky ‘Convertible Balloon’ is almost funky, definitely danceable in a jerky, post-punk meets Laurel Canyon kind of way, while the closing ‘Baby say Goodbye’ throws everything and the kitchen sink from the Phil Spector produces The Ramones playbook into the mix: layered vocals, speeding up drums, sha la las, wee-ooohs and whistling included.

At 5:11 it’s the longest track on the album, a suitably “epic” coda to a record that delivers on its promise in buckets (and spades). Wavves own the beach this summer, dude.

Justin Toland