No-Fi, Wavves Hit it Big through Social Media

A New Kind of Rockstar

by Christopher Joshua Benton

Popular indie rock website Gorilla v. Bear, in addition to a few to other blogs, have become the penultimate tastemakers for the no-fi genre

Photo: Christopher Joshua Benton

Athens, Ga--Watching Nathan Williams in his music video for “No Hope Kids,” filmed during his world tour, it is easy to imagine him a picaresque hero, getting wasted and playing shows, unwittingly implicated in the machinations of blog hype and Internet coolhunting. In less than two years, he’s released two albums, a bevy of cassettes, and has endured the hype and backlash waves of fickle music listeners. Already, he’s in the redemption phase. Wavves is the paradigm for a new kind of alternative band made on the Internet and in bedrooms, and promoted via social media tools.

Wavves was the bedroom pop project of one Nathan Williams (age 23); now, the epitome of “Gorilla v. Bear” blog hype, don’t-take-too-much-X-before-playing-stadiums advice from your mom, and the poster boy for the n of genre. Wavves also now includes the hardest working drummer in showbiz, Zach Hill.

His music probably hinges on an impossibility: if you ever tried playing a scratched Smiley Smile bootleg LP on blown-out speakers, so you used the line-out; instead, connecting the vinyl to that amp that’s been stuck in overdrive since you found it at some garage sale, the output would sound awful, but it’d also, maybe, reach that equilibrium of vaguely tuneful/ groggy pixilation/ distortion noise that Wavves has adopted as his own. His lo-fi noise music (no-fi) buries melody behind a heavy level of grit.

He’s not the only one: Why is everyone and their mom in a lo/no-fi band these days?

“I don’t know, Williams said laughing in a phone interview. "Maybe because it’s easy to do, it’s easy to record, and it doesn’t really cost money. But I’m not sure. I wouldn’t say I’m any scene in particular, I’m just labeled that."

"No-fi's really popular with these blogger guys," Williams said later, outside the 40 Watt Club after his performance.

At 21, after quitting his day job, Nathan Williams spent a month making ramshackle home recordings in GarageBand that would become his first two albums. Through the course of those two D.I.Y. albums, titled Wavves and Wavvves.

Simple and wide-eyed, it’s his pseudo-adolescent, bratty Brian Wilsonisms and up-Beat-Happening-floor-tom pop that transforms such drab subject matter into optimistic stoner anthems.

It wouldn’t be reductive to say Wavves has tapped into the cool zeitgeist where everyone has a fuzzy bedroom pet project, where everyone has a little too much consonance in their name (see UUVVWWZ, Lovvers, Nodzzz), and where no one can really play their instruments.

It is arguable that without the power of the blogging community and other social media like Hypemachine (a blog aggregation tool that collects MP3s from various weblog platform), Wavves and bands like him would still be very obscure.

"I think the first place that gave me press was that blog Gorilla v. Bear," Williams said.

"Gorilla v. Bear" is a popular web destination for indie music. With over 3 million visitors a week, it has become a forum for heralding what will become the next big thing in independent rock music.

"I never heard of the genre no-fi until I started going to Gorilla v. Bear, and there's this new genre 'chillwave' that Carles from that 'Hipster Runoff' website made up. It's like their inventing genres…," Andrew Dykes said, a local musician who hopes to get involved in the blog machine.

Ryan Grub, lead singer of another up-and-coming no-fi band Ganglians, currently on tour with Wavves, is convinced of the power of blogs. "We're not one of those Internet guys, but it's hard to imagine who would know about us without blogs and stuff."

Perhaps most significant of this new rockist narrative is that “overnight success” is literal—relative popularity is instantaneous and measured by a new temporality called “blog years,” an ADD blank (screen) generation eye-blink test, akin to a “light year.”

The short incubation period from obscurity, to hypeblogged, to Pitchfork Best New Music wunderkind, to backlash, only magnifies that most of these bands can’t perform live. When Williams first started playing live shows last spring, he was terrible. His inexperience reached a tipping point during his so-called “meltdown” at the Primavera Sound Festival in May where he took a cocktail of ecstasy, Valium, and Xanax, harassed the audience and was booed off stage.

“When I first started playing, the first couple of shows were with 500 people, so I just got thrown into it and I didn’t have any time to work the set out with somebody and practice and play smaller shows for a while. It just kinda blew up so quickly and I was playing for tons of people right away so it wasn’t necessarily very good in the very beginning. There was stuff to work out and its just like with anything, you do it enough and you get better at it,” he said.

Since then, Wavves has played to glowing live reviews and plenty of redemption feature stories. And with a new album already recorded, it seems he’s about go through it all over again. Whether Wavves or Ganglians are still around after the hype, is anyone's guess.

Kyle Hoover, Ganglians guitarist seems hopeful, talking out of a sinus infection. "It's tough on tour, but I want to do this forever."

Forever and anon, with a little blog love, it seems like any musician with a dream and recording equipment can be propelled from anonymity to fame.

Edited by Ali Rosenberger