Listen Closely: Micachu and the Shapes

Things sure have changed here on Morrison's Mountain.

My girlfriend and I moved out of our San Francisco apartment on Saturday. UHaul is great, by the way. Great if you like half-broken graffiti-spattered trucks, surly employees, and loose interpretations of "guaranteed reservation."

Now I'm lazing about in my girlfriend's parents' backyard in Santa Rosa. Four days from now I finish my career as a tutor and begin my stint as an unemployed grad-student-to-be.

I just wrote a sarcastic letter to UHaul and now I'm embarking on a new project, a reflection on fifteen albums that shaped me as a listener. I do this kind of thing in the interstices of my life. Thinking about the past comforts me, secures my position in time.

That post will be up by the end of the week.

In the meantime, enjoy a silly little video for a silly little song called "Golden Phone" by Micachu and the Shapes, whose recent album Jewellery contains some of the weirdest, catchiest indie pop of the year:



How perfect is that Game Boy hook at 0:37? And the breakdown at 1:36?

Like all of the best songs on Jewellery ("Lips," "Calculator"), "Golden Phone" sounds like it was put together with scraps from the kiddie music junk heap. And somehow everything fits.

Listen Closely: Grizzly Bear

Grizzly Bear already gets too much hype, but the Brooklyn band's new album Veckatimest is too good, and the following video for the single "Two Weeks" too creepy, to ignore:



Kinda yucky, right?

Other potential singles on Veckatimest include "Southern Point," "Cheerleader," "Ready, Able," and "While You Wait for the Others." Even filler tracks like "About Face" and "Hold Still" sound exquisite through (non-iPod) headphones.

If you listen to one indie rock album in 2009, this should be it.

Enlightened Paranoia

I have here in my hand a list of two-hundred and five... a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

~ Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1950

I have, my brethren, an official, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity, professions, etc., of the officers and members of a Society of Illuminati (or as they are now more generally and properly styled Illuminees) consisting of one hundred members, instituted in Virginia, by the Grand Orient of France.

~ Reverend Jedediah Morse, 1799

In History class, high schoolers learn that Joseph McCarthy was a bad man and that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln were great men. They are encouraged to pluck McCarthy out of the river of history and say, "This one doesn't belong."

But the truth is he does belong. McCarthy's style of thinking, writing, and speaking has ample precedent in American history. The first historian to show this was Richard Hofstadter, whose essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" was a multidisciplinary blockbuster in 1964.

Hofstadter puts a name to McCarthy's rhetorical mode - "the paranoid style" - and traces its history from anti-Illuminists like Jedediah Morse to anti-Communists like McCarthy. The "central preconception of the paranoid style," says Hofstadter, is "the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character."

In a paragraph not unsuited to an essay about eighteenth-century novels of seduction, Hofstadter describes the "enemy":

... he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.

The implication is that such a man does not exist. Paranoiacs and novelists, perhaps in cahoots, invent different versions of him every couple of decades. He was an Illuminist in the 1790s. In the mid-1800s, a Freemason. And a Muslim now.

Hofstadter's essay typifies a kind of historical discourse that surfaced in the post-war academy, one that engages in present-day issues without a pretense of neutrality. Hofstadter makes no bones about his liberal sympathies. Early in the essay he cites the contemporary "Goldwater movement" as an example of "how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority."

The very term "paranoid style" reflects a bias. The so-called paranoiacs, who at certain times in history made up entire political parties, wouldn't call their discourse paranoid. They'd call it reason.

So would we, if they had been right. But Hofstadter's paranoiacs flamed out one by one, exposed as delusionals, exaggerators, or outright liars. Jedediah Morse's list of Virginian Illuminati was never authenticated, and McCarthy's fear of a Communist takeover never had a chance at coming true.

What Hofstadter misses is how often the paranoid style appears in "legitimate" political discourse, especially during the all-important second half of the 1700s. Take, for instance, this juicy passage from George Washington's Farewell Address:

... as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth [that the unity of government is of the utmost importance]; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness...

Here we have the hallmarks of the paranoid style: an evocation of a widespread, masterfully executed conspiracy; an enemy who operates "constantly and actively," "covertly and insidiously." And yet Washington's Farewell Address rarely comes up in discussions of the paranoid style. Hofstadter doesn't even mention it.

Which is weird. The Farewell Address is one of the most ubiquitous American speeches. Every year on the observance of Washington's birthday a different senator reads the speech in legislative session; last year Mike Johanns, the Republican senator from Nebraska, did the honors.

Perhaps familiarity conceals the vehemence of the speech's rhetoric.

Or maybe since Washington declines to specify an enemy, his tone doesn't seem truly paranoid. Say he had singled out the Illuminati, or the Jacobins: he would have seemed like more of a conspiracy-monger.

But his formulation of the enemy is vague enough to apply to any "anti-American" group. Hence the durability of the Farewell Address. In 1954, Joseph McCarthy would have seen red in the passage about covert and insidious "external enemies." And imagine the effect of the same words on the congressional audience in February 2002, when suspicion of Islamic terrorists - and, shamefully, Muslims in general - had reached its height.

If Washington's Farewell Address annually revives the paranoid style in our government, Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence inscribed it on the birth of our nation.

U.S. history buffs might balk at this characterization of the Declaration. After all, the most vocal paranoiacs of late eighteenth century, from Jedediah Morse to Harvard theologian David Tappan, were Jefferson's political rivals. In a much-reprinted letter, Jefferson characterizes the writings of Augustin Barruel, an anti-Illuminist who influenced Morse, as "the ravings of a Bedlamite."

But the paranoid style was a common mode of expression at the time, and it slips into the flabby midsection of the Declaration. For eighteen paragraphs, which teachers often tell students to skip, Jefferson enumerates the wrongs perpetrated by King George III. "He" attempted to turn our military against us. "He" razed our towns and destroyed our lives. "He" incited the Indians to rebellion.

This singling out of one identifiable evildoer is a convention of the paranoid style. As Hofstadter puts it:

The paranoid's interpretation of history is... distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will.

The final draft of the Declaration is extreme enough in this respect, but Jefferson's first draft goes even further. He blames the king not only for the "piratical warfare" of the slave trade, but for the slave insurrections that rocked plantations in the late 1700s. Perhaps sensing the extravagance of these claims, Jefferson wraps up with a "strange-but-true!" appeal, standard in paranoid discourse:

Future ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man adventured, within the short compass of twelve years only, to lay a foundation so broad and so undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered and fixed in principles of freedom.

All of this was edited out. It's possible that the editors, members of the Second Continental Congress, doubted the accuracy of Jefferson's accusations. More likely, however, they refused to sign a document that condemned the slave trade. They sort of dug the slave trade.

You might be surprised that Washington's Farewell Address and Jefferson's Declaration of Independence employ the paranoid style. The word "paranoia" connotes at best intellectual laziness, at worst psychological abnormality. In the eighteenth century, however, paranoid thinking was considered up-to-date, even enlightened.

The historian Gordon Wood gives the clearest explanation of this surprising idea. He locates the philosophical foundation of the paranoid style in the Enlightenment, a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural movement:

The work of John Locke and other philosophers opened reflective minds to the startling supposition that society, though no doubt ordained in principle by God, was man's own creation - formed and sustained, and thus alterable, by human beings acting autonomously and purposefully.

It follows that men could, with the proper use of reason, dissect and understand their world, their own handiwork. A new "science" of history thus emerged, with cause-and-effect as its central mechanism. In Wood's words:

Cause was something that produced an effect; every effect had a cause; the cause and its effect were integrally related. Such thinking created a new world of laws, measurements, predictions, and constancies or regularities of behavior...

In this type of historical analysis every event ("effect") can be traced to a human action ("cause"). This slips easily into what Wood calls "conspiratorial interpretation" and what Hofstadter terms "the paranoid style": a tendency to attribute events "to the concerted designs of willful individuals."

If something bad happens, someone must be responsible. And if something bad happens on a massive scale (the Reign of Terror in France, 9/11), the culprits must be numerous and well-organized.

As Wood sums it up:

Far from being symptomatic of irrationality, this conspiratorial mode of explanation represented an enlightened stage in Western man's long struggle to comprehend his social reality. It flowed from the scientific promise of the Enlightenment and represented an effort, perhaps in retrospect a last desperate effort, to hold men personally and morally responsible for their actions.

So when Jefferson blamed King George for every evil under the sun, when Washington imagined enemies in "from different causes and from different quarters," when McCarthy ranted about undercover communists in the State Department, when Hillary Clinton spoke of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband, they all relied on a rational, "enlightened" framework.

The same framework, used for a very different purpose, underlies these more recent words:

It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

The effect: Barack Obama's victory. The cause: freely acting individuals banding together and acting purposefully.

A conspiracy, one might say.

Listen Closely: Passion Pit

Passion Pit should annoy me. The squealing synths and kiddie choirs should annoy me. Lead singer Michael Angelakos's voice, well-described by Pitchfork as a "singing-in-your-hairbrush falsetto," should annoy me.

But none of it does. Passion Pit's new album Manners, released to big hype on Tuesday, is full of catchy, exquisitely produced, re-listenable electropop - better in every way than Pit's inconsistent debut EP Chunk of Change.

Check out the vid for the album's first single, "The Reeling":



Second single "Moth's Wings" is flowing through the tubes at the moment, but just wait till "Little Secrets" bum rushes the blogosphere. Explosion potential.

And trend-mongers beware: if these dudes hit top 40 radio, brace for a Vampire Weekend-style backlash.

Not that Chekhov Needs a Defense

Few professional scribblers would dare to profane Anton Chekhov's short stories, so you have to admire the guts of Justin St. Germain, who in this post calls the Russian doctor a "middling writer." St. Germain himself is an author, and a better one than his taste in fiction suggests.

Here's his well-written, witty, and dead wrong critique of the Chekhov's much-anthologized story "The Lady with the Little Dog":

Let's examine what I seem to recall is the passage the aforementioned colleague mentioned as proof of the story's greatness. It comes toward the end of the second section. The central characters, two lovers having an affair, sit on a bench looking at the sea. (I'm using the Litvinov translation, if anybody cares -- full text here.)

When they got out of the carriage at Oreanda they sat down on a bench not far from the church, and looked down at the sea, without talking. Yalta could be dimly discerned through the morning mist, and white clouds rested motionless on the summits of the mountains. Not a leaf stirred, the grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow roar of the sea came up to them, speaking of peace, of the eternal sleep lying in wait for us all. The sea had roared like this long before there was any Yalta or Oreanda, it was roaring now, and it would go on roaring, just as indifferently and hollowly, when we had passed away. And it may be that in this continuity, this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, of the continuous movement of life on earth, of the continuous movement toward perfection.

Side by side with a young woman, who looked so exquisite in the early light, soothed and enchanted by the sight of all this magical beauty--sea, mountains, clouds and the vast expanse of the sky--Gurov told himself that, when you came to think of it, everything in the world is beautiful really, everything but our own thoughts and actions, when we lose sight of the higher aims of life, and of our dignity as human beings.

It appalls me that this passage might be offered as evidence of greatness. A man looking at the sea and pondering his own mortality? The sea will go on roaring after we have all passed away? The actual phrases "the eternal sleep lying in wait for us all" and "when you came to think of it, everything in the world is beautiful really," the latter coming in the same sentence as that bathetic bit about losing sight of our dignity as human beings? Do I really need to go on? If any of these same Chekhovophiles read that second paragraph in an undergraduate story, they'd likely run a big red X right through it and write "cliche!" in the margins. But because a Russian doctor wrote it a hundred years ago, it's supposed to be profound? Sweet holy me on a bicycle!

This is typical of Chekhov's attempts at pathos, which generally take the form of middle-class characters staring at something, the ocean or a landscape or a looking-glass, and thinking about the tragedy of their own lives. What his adorers offer up as evidence of his profound human insight strikes me as a bunch of bullshit bourgeois ennui about infidelity and mortality, a sort of prototype and justification for reams of subsequent pap about scions of suburban gentry moving to Manhattan, getting divorced, and meditating on their own meaninglessness. No wonder an entire generation of tenured professors worshiped at his feet.

And here's a revised version of the reply I posted on St. Germain's blog:

Hi Justin,

I like your blog and what I've seen of your fiction. When I worked at ZYZZYVA, I helped publish your wonderful short story "Tortolita."

My friend Michael Berger told me about this post because he figured it would piss me off. It didn't, mostly because you make your argument in the spirit of fun.

But since I'm a member of what you call the Chekhov fan club, I feel obligated to defend him. Apparently I've been seduced by his romanticization of bourgeois slackers and his condescension to dumb muzhiks. And I was introduced to his work by a creative writing professor. In other words, I fit the profile. Fifteen years from now I'll probably move to a Manhattan loft with my 21 year-old mistress, my scotch collection, and my self-pity.

Incidentally, does Saul Bellow rub you the wrong way?

Let me start with "The Lady with the Little Dog," a wise and delicate story you've dismissed (seemingly) for a single reason: the perceived shallowness of Gurov's "epiphany," which occurs halfway through the story. The trouble is you've oversimplified how Chekhov uses this epiphany. It's a tool for characterization, not an opportunity for the author to make his own profound observations. Gurov's insights in his moment of exultation aren't meant to be deep or even accurate.

So with that in mind, let's go back to the paragraphs you quoted. As the lone modifier ("Gurov reflected") indicates, we're close to Gurov's point of view. Very close, in fact: Chekhov was one of the pioneers of free-indirect discourse, a mode of third-person narration that "quotes" characters' thoughts without quotation marks.

So those treacly phrases - "eternal sleep lying in wait," "everything was beautiful" - belong not to Chekhov but to Gurov. Gurov perceives "eternity" in the sea. Gurov suddenly thinks everything is beautiful in the world. Chekhov isn't trying to blow our minds. He's just showing what Gurov, a well-educated but somewhat shallow man, thinks about as he sits with his new mistress staring at the ocean.

The forced extravagance of Gurov's thoughts makes more sense when you consider how mundane he finds his affair, how much he wants to experience loftier feelings. Toward the beginning of the story he fantasizes about "stories of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains," and indulges "the tempting thought of a quick, fleeting liaison, a romance with an unknown woman, of whose very name you are ignorant."

But quickly he learns her name: Anna Sergeevna. He finds her naïve and awkward. After they have sex for the first time, he behaves coldly:

There was a watermelon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.

When Anna's post-coital guilt sets in, she tries to talk about it, but Gurov is unreceptive.

Gurov was bored listening, he was annoyed by the naïve tone, by this repentance, so unexpected and out of place; had it not been for the tears in her eyes, one might have thought she was joking or playing a role.

Nothing about this affair is mysterious or majestic. So as Gurov looks down on the sea with Anna, he tries to lend some poetry to his situation, some beauty. He wants to see himself as a romantic hero, not a middle-aged creeper who takes advantage of a naïve married woman.

Gurov and Anna continue to seek out spectacular natural vistas, because "their impressions each time were beautiful, majestic." Without these vistas, without the flattering light nature casts on their time together, they'd be a pair of dirty bodies in a hotel room.

When the first phase of their relationship ends, Gurov feels he has deceived Anna and perhaps himself:

... he had been affectionate with her, and sincere, but all the same, in his treatment of her, in his tone and caresses, there had been a slight shade of mockery, the somewhat coarse arrogance of a happy man, who was, moreover, almost twice her age. She had all the while called him kind, extraordinary, lofty; obviously, he had appeared to her not as he was in reality, and therefore he had involuntarily deceived her...

In an affair full of various kinds of deception, Gurov's "epiphany" is a clever, subtle self-deception.

But the story isn't close to done. In the most unexpected development of all, Gurov ends up legitimately falling in love with Anna - or more accurately he falls in love with his memory of her, a memory that probably glosses over the boredom, the tawdriness, the deception.

Though I find all of this wonderful, I'd never demand that you feel the same way. But since you're a literary writer, a professional in the field, shouldn't you dig a bit deeper into the text before you dismiss it?

By the way, the Litvinov translation you use doesn't do any favors to Chekhov's prose. Pevear and Volokhonsky's version, which I quoted from, goes down way smoother.

As for your comments about Chekhov's place in the canon, your "tenuous theory" that he came into favor because he represented a "safe kind of different" is more tenuous than you think. Chekhov appears on syllabi because lots of fairly bright people (William Maxwell, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and all those damn professors) study his stories over and over, and find them to be exceptionally well crafted.

Chekhov doesn't have the commitment to philosophical discourse of Dostoevsky or the panoramic ambition of Tolstoy, but with the short story, novella, and (let's not forget) dramatic forms, he did a number of new and remarkable things. I already mentioned his use of free-indirect discourse. His plots, especially toward the end of his career, take on shapes that have no precedents in the canon. The characters in his stories and novellas have the kind of self-contradictory yet self-consistent psychologies that previously existed only in novels. He's incredibly efficient.

And most importantly, he's unselfish enough to let his characters be themselves. Let me explain what I mean by this. Chekhov never makes his characters think more nobly or intelligently than they should. If a character is stupid, Chekhov's narration absorbs that stupidity and makes no excuses for it. Chekhov doesn't step in and say, "Okay, reader, I totally know this character is a dumbass." Tolstoy might do that, because Tolstoy, in addition to being one of the best writers ever, had a hell of an ego. But Chekhov simply gives us the character.

And in "The Lady with the Little Dog," he's unselfish enough to step aside and let Gurov make his meretricious observations about nature and mortality.

Such are the virtues taught in creative writing classes, and with Chekhov these virtues come conveniently packaged in short stories. I don't know about your writing professors, but none of mine ever assigned a novel.

And that does bother me. I agree that Chekhov and his descendants - Mansfield, Cheever, Munro - are too dominant in creative writing programs. I'd like to see some pre-19th-century literature on the reading list. And some Charles W. Chestnutt, an underrated writer you mention. And some speculative fiction. And some mainstream pap. And some avant garde bullshit. Writers-in-training need variety, and one or two Chekhov stories will do. Reading in school is all about the quick sample.

But if you want to prove that Chekhov is a "middling writer," you'd better write a longer post.

*UPDATE*
Justin took up that challenge here with wit and grace. He's still wrong.

Listen Closely: St. Vincent

The noun "grower" has a few colloquial meanings that might surprise you.

If you Google "grower," the third result will be "The Marijuana Grower's Handbook."

Enter it into Urban Dictionary, the linguistic Wild West of the Internet, and you'll find this definition: "A penis that gets a lot bigger during an erection."

But I'm more interested in the musical meaning of "grower": that is, "an album that gets better with time," especially one that strikes the listener as odd and unsuccessful on the first listen.

Radiohead's Kid A is a recent example of a grower. Nobody expected a rock album, much less a Radiohead album, to embrace mellow electronic textures and avant garde knob-twiddling. Many early reviews had a tone of baffled disappointment.

Nowadays Kid A is widely considered the best album of the new millennium.

St. Vincent ain't no Thom Yorke, but her album Actor, released last week, is a big-time grower. My first listen left me cold. The jagged songs, with their awkward rhythms and sudden blasts of noise, seemed unmemorable to me.

A few days later, I listened to the album again. I was intrigued. I didn't know why.

On my third listen, the thing came together. The off-kilter hooks revealed their catchiness, the lyrics began to make emotional sense, the separate tracks cohered.

It's wrong to excerpt from it, but I have to give you a sample:



There's something viscerally unsettling about that video. And about St. Vincent herself, with her Bambi eyes and her eye-of-the-hurricane voice. She should be wildly famous.

Wavves Suxx

The most divisive new figure in indie rock is a 22 year-old San Diegan named Nathan Williams. Under the nom du GarageBand of Wavves, he records lo-fi noise pop that will never, ever go mainstream.

And that's part of his appeal. The connoisseur need not worry about the dingy neighborhood coffeehouse of Williams's music being overrun by strollers.

Reviews of Wavves read like either ecstatic whispers ("Psst! Listen to this!") or world-weary takedowns ("I knew Lou Barlow, Lou Barlow was a friend of mine, and you, Nathan Williams, are no Lou Barlow"). Just look at the Metacritic page for Wavves' almost-eponymous LP Wavvves: the ratings range from 100 to 40.

In a recent Washington Post interview, the lead singer of another noisy lo-fi band called Psychedelic Horseshit worked himself into rage about Williams's success: "Wavves is getting $30,000 to [expletive] crank out this [expletive] generic [expletive]." The poor guy even made a t-shirt that said, "WAVVES SUXX."

When Stereogum, the influential indie rock blog, posted excerpts of this interview, the message boards lit up.

... if any of you have seen Wavves live you would understand only a monster could hate them, and specifically Nathan Williams. he's fucking adorable. he dresses like a middle school skater, he has the face of a 14 year old AND he's tiny. totally 'put-in-pocket' adorable. also he makes fun music.

~ Mandy

wavves is easily one of the least deserving bands to ever receive any degree of attention. I've seen them live, and if you're not drunk, stoned, or an asshole, it's impossible to ignore the fact that they sound like your little brothers punk band

~ chris

For those who don't keep up with indie rock culture, all of this jealousy and anger and defensiveness probably seems baffling. It's only a matter of taste, right?

Well, not exactly. It's also about identity, self-perceived intelligence, and community. Say you love Wavves. You have a passion for scuzzy pop-punk (identity) and you've earned that passion through open-mindedness and close listening (intelligence). You "discovered" Wavves on some random blog page and emailed the link to your buddies (community).

Then some critic comes along and trashes Wavves. Points out that Nathan Williams steals from better bands. Claims that underneath the distortion there isn't much going on. Declares that Wavves fans are just fad-mongers.

You're pissed. This dude has undermined your identity, questioned your intelligence, attacked your community.

All popular bands create tension between listeners, but something in the nature of Wavves' music provokes unusually violent fandom and haterdom. I might as well admit that I'm a hater, though not an especially passionate one. So instead of lashing out troll-style, I'll attempt a reasoned critique.

First, give a quick listen (and try to ignore the happy Chinese dancers):



My basic claim is that this music does not reward repeat listens.

Some people don't think re-listenability is important; they argue that music, like other pop ephemera, can be enjoyed, quickly forgotten, and still considered "great." I'm not sure I understand this perspective. To my mind, the loveliness of living with music, growing with it, is the whole point of buying it in the first place.

My litmus test: a song cannot be great unless the fifth listen is better than the first, and the tenth better than the fifth.

There are a number of ways for music to achieve re-listenability. It can have exceptional detail: with each listen, you uncover new tidbits - a perfect drum fill, a well-chosen word, a change-up in the melody, a correspondence of language and sound.

Or a band can borrow from such a variety of different styles that your favorite songs change according to your mood.

In rare cases, musicianship can maintain your interest, but that's mostly a jazz thing.

Usually re-listenability results from great melodies. Great melodies are durable. I have memorized every note of Daft Punk's "Digital Love"; the song can no longer surprise me; but I will never tire of its melody.

Nathan Williams writes good melodies, not great ones, and that's what does him in. Because there's not much else to recommend his music. No sonic detail, little variety, dumb lyrics, clumsy musicianship.

Amateurism, Wavves fans might argue, is part of the lo-fi aesthetic. Fair enough. But if you're going to cop the Jesus & Mary Chain and Guided by Voices style, you'd better bring some JMC or GBV-grade songwriting.

Also, great lo-fi bands know how to vary their sound, even with a limited pallette. Wavvves - the album, that is - maintains a midtempo, fuzzed-out consistency from the first track to the last. A few dull instrumentals and the slowish, stripped-down "Weed Demon" provide the only changes in pace.

But certain uber-clever music critics think Nathan Williams is a boy genius, as do mobs of indie scenesters. I suspect that many of these people won't have Wavves on their iPods two years from now, but, at the risk of sounding too sure of myself, I should acknowledge that Williams has some talent.

He's good at burying pop melodies under off-putting noise. If you're sharp enough to identify those melodies, you can't help feeling satisfied with yourself. You might say things like, "Ultimately, Nathan Williams is a songwriter in the mold of Brian Wilson," and others might say, "How do you hear the Beach Boys in that? It's just noise." They can't hear properly, but you can. You have taste.

So there's a self-gratifying thrill in finding any semblance of structure in the screeching noise of Wavves.

What's more, the process of discovery takes time and a little work. At first the feedback and megaphone vocals unsettle you. You ask youself, "Is this music?" But then you discover patterns, melodies.

With this discovery, you've been ushered you into an exclusive club, past the graffitied streetfront and the screaming bouncer, but now you ask, What's inside?

Not much, in Wavves' case. The strongest songs on Wavvves are "So Bored," "No Hope Kids," "To the Dregs," and "Beach Demon," and these weaken on post-discovery listens. Other artists write better songs. Williams even subtly ackowledges this in an L.A. Times interview:

If I had recorded "So Bored" in a studio, it would sound like an almost guilty-sounding pop song. You could put it next to some Matchbox 20 and feel real embarrassed about it.

Why "embarrassed"? Because the Matchbox 20 tune would probably hold up on repeat listens. And the Wavves song, stripped of noisy distractions from its mediocrity, might not survive the first.