SAN DIEGO — Reclining on a sofa outside the modest structure that sits behind his parents' San Diego home, Nathan Williams, the 22-year-old musician who records under the name Wavves, is halfway through a six-pack of late-afternoon beers. Popular indie music scene lore has held that he lives and works out of a pool house, but truth be told, there's no pool.
"It's a shack in the back," he concedes.
Williams has been making music as Wavves for only a little more than a year, recording inside that cramped shack. But he's managed to generate plenty of interest -- partially by posting his songs for free on his Ghost Ramp blog, which he started as an avenue to talk about rap music after quitting his job at a record store.
Among the revitalized lo-fi rock community, Wavves has emerged as a standout for his raw, jittery sound, comprised of guitar, drums and heavy distortion that often masks Williams' vocals, rendering them unintelligible.
His new full-length collection, "Wavvves," debuted on iTunes four weeks ago, with the physical album hitting stores this week. The staggered release wasn't planned -- the songs were making the rounds online to such a great extent that label Fat Possum felt pressure to amend its rollout schedule.
Williams was in the middle of a week at home after 32 dates in Europe and before a month of shows around the U.S. (He was booked for an impressive nine performances over four days during the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.) But neither the online appetite for his songs nor the spate of concert bookings necessarily speaks to the commercial potential of Wavves' decidedly crude music.
Williams used the GarageBand program that comes standard on Macintosh computers to record both "Wavvves" and last year's self-titled debut. Asked how he learned the finer points of GarageBand, Williams jokingly replied, "I didn't."
That brash, homemade quality is precisely what attracted Fat Possum President Matthew Johnson to Williams. His first response to hearing the music? "This sounds like snot, it's totally disposable, it's just a mess, it's totally on drugs and drunk. I have to sign it."
Inside Williams' sonic mess lurk references to the vocals of girl groups and dreamy SoCal pop from the 1960s, though, on tracks like "So Bored," Wavves skips the sun-drenched optimism in favor of angst-y despair.
