Am I too old to be first row at a Wavves’ gig? Probably, but I just wanted to take a few pictures, however they turned out all fuzzy and blurry with all that pushing-jumping-bouncing-surfing energy emerging from the crowd. The two nice girls chatting behind me gave me a tap in the back as if they wanted to excuse themselves to have bumped into me at the first crowd eruption. That was very nice, but you were kidding right? You knew it would be like this from start to finish right? I don’t know what happened to these girls, the whole show was so out of focus through the lens of my camera, and once I was caught in this sea of sweaty sticky stinky bodies, there was no escape, I was stuck there till the end, with that constant fight or flight response telling me there was peril all around.
I guess Wavves’ songs trigger something absolutely visceral for all these people that had packed the Echoplex, they reacted at the first note escaping from Nathan Williams’ guitar with a violent but joyous moshing energy, and of course the crowd surfing that comes with the game. The fat guy behind me was incessantly hitting my back with his belly – I first thought it was a girl who was doing this with her breast, and that says enough about the confused state of my mind at this moment,… what can I say, the guy had the time of his life! Body parts everywhere, a hand trying to grab my ear, a pair of legs jumping above my head, the usual mayhem, a joyous romping crash-body spree, with the Wavves quartet making a thunderous sound on stage, playing hits of the 2010 ‘King of the Beach’ album and new songs off the more recent ‘Afraid of Heights’. Honestly, most of songs sounded kind of the same to me, played with that same crashing fuzzy sound, Nirvana-esque grunge and Williams’ dragging howl. It was difficult to hear that beachy-sunny vibe that characterizes the recordings of the songs, since live, it was all loud fuzz, noisy distortion and elbows in the face.
Kings of the beach, rather kings of the fuzz! They were trashing around with a complete assurance, Nathan Williams looking like a hippie hobo with his torn out sweat pant and oversized dye t-shirt, while all I was seeing of Stephen Pope was his long frizzy mane of blonde hair banging the air. The band wasn’t paying attention too much to the crowd in frenzy, they are obviously used to it, but they were hardly taking their breath between songs. Sooner in the week, they had played a more-than-sold-out show at the Smell with FIDLAR, and I had a pretty good idea of the carnage these two bands together can produce. Still, the Echoplex was full with an Echo Park crowd ironically having a lot of fun, while hooting lyrics about boredom, self-loathing, disinterest, disillusion and failure. Williams had arrived wearing a cap that read ‘Death’ in large gothic letters and all his songs were received like depressed and nihilistic youth anthems,… seriously, the lyrics are no laughing matter, ‘Holding a gun to my head’, ‘No hope and no future’, ‘We'll die the same loser’ he whined in the new song ‘Demon to Lean on’, that was particularly well received by the crowd,… ‘I think I’m dying/May be I’m thirsty’, ‘I’ll always be on my own/Fucked and alone’, ‘Got nothing to do/Nothing to prove’ he continued in ‘Afraid of Heights’, but nothing would stop this crowd from having a great time, … and may be that was the point, that was what all these kids were here for, screaming their hopelessness and misery while thinking about their next high.
Setlist
Idiot
Super soaker
King of the beach
Bug
Demon to lean on
Paranoid
Afraid of Heights
Post Acid
Friends were gone
Linus Spacehead
Beat me up
Sail to the sun
100% (Sonic Youth cover)
Green Eyes
No hope kids 
