MUSIC: FORCE FIELD AND WAVVES

Talking to Nathan Williams on the phone is like asking your boss to up your pay: awkward. Asked what he would have done had he not gotten a break in the music world, he says, “Shot myself in the face.” Alrighty then.

We’re no strangers to Williams’ sarcastic remarks: the 22-year-old skate-punk brat was a member of Foam favorite Fantastic Magic, a world-psych band we rapped with last year about the static-y, flute-laden stuff they were releasing on cassettes. When the group disbanded, we lost touch with Williams. It turns out he was holed up in the shed behind his parents’ San Diego house and reinventing himself as Wavves, a critically beloved maker of twisted, fuzzed-out punk anthems about the young adult stoner-boozer lifestyle. “I never thought that stuff would be interesting to write about, but that was just what I was doing,” he says of his debut album Wavvves (that’s right, three V’s this time.) The song “So Bored” could yet make Williams the voice of his generation, or at least a fashionably apathetic part of it. That is, if he finds the hustle to keep his star on the rise. “I’m generally a lazy person,” he confesses, as if we couldn’t hear the yawns he was letting out between questions.

-Cristina Black