The Wiggins, WATERWORLD EP

When I first listened to WATERWORLD, the newest EP from The Wiggins, aka Jon Read, a surprising thing happened. I was in the car, driving my 8-year-old around, and as the first strains of lead track “Dreamland” convulsed through the speakers, all raw, fucked-up percussion, scratchy production, overfuzzed guitars, and sung-chanted-snarled vocals, I instinctively cringed, figuring I was about to get a plaintive, “Dad, could you put on Imagine Dragons?” (Full disclosure: they are the 8-year-old’s favorite band.)

Instead, however, the little voice from the backseat chirped, “Hey, I really like this?” My response was an incredulous, “Seriously?”, but the little guy confirmed it. He couldn’t tell me why he liked it, but he did.

See, though, that’s the key to what Read does — sure, songs like “Let Me Down” sound like they were pressed to vinyl back in about 1976 and buried in muck until the modern day, when they’re unceremoniously excavated and thrown onto a record player without first getting a good cleaning. But at their core, they’re pop songs, no question about it, and if you listen past the layers of lo-fi noise, you can find that tuneful, catchy, throwback ’60s pop center.

Take title track “Waterworld,” for one; it’s like a Motown-ish girl-group track minus the ladies, sweet and full of longing and about, um, living in a world made of water, except that as The Wiggins, Read slathers the whole thing in lo-fi echo and turns the rumbly bass way, way up. I keep thinking of Freda Payne as I listen, despite the fact that Read is pretty far removed from an old-school soul diva, because there is a lot of soul and blues and R&B lurking beneath.

Further on, “Rat Boy” is somehow bouncy and cheerful, in spite of the sneering, snarling vocals, hyperdistorted drums that are less “beats” and more “rhythmic splashes of static”, and the titanic bass that essentially overwhelms everything else. It’s like somebody took a Sonics 45 and played it at 33 RPM through speakers they’d meticulously ripped apart with a box knife; it’s raw and messy, but the underlying garage-pop song is still there.

For its part, the bass-heavy, murky “Rx” has echoes of Nirvana’s “Lithium” in its sing-song-y pre-chorus break, and sounds like it would’ve been a no-brainer on Kurt Cobain’s personal playlist even beyond that. And album closer “Another Day” finally cleans things up a bit and becomes damn near a country song, all downtrodden yearning that slowly lopes off into the sunset as the EP itself ends.

Weirdly, the reference point I keep coming back to with this particular Wiggins release isn’t somebody like The Kills or Quintron, like I have with Read’s other, earlier stuff, but The Magnetic Fields’ first album, Distant Plastic Trees. It’s not that The Wiggins are anywhere close to the shimmery romanticism of Stephen Merritt’s early music, no, but there’s a strange similarity of approach, it feels like — sometimes the drums aren’t drums, for one, but just crackly sounds, and sometimes the whole thing’s mired in a big haze of sound.

I should note, as well, that part of Read’s genius here is that his songs, noisy as they are, don’t force you to listen; they lurk, rather, on the fringes of your consciousness as they spill out of the speakers/headphones. You’re listening on some level, but you might notice that you’re absorbing the music itself until later.

Some of that’s due to his muttered, quasi-intelligible vocal style, to be sure, but I think it actually goes deeper than that. It’s almost like he’s crafted these songs as an artistic sort of pink noise that can sit just on the periphery of your awareness but sneakily seep in around the edges without you even realizing it.

Which is to say that with WATERWORLD it feels less like Jon Read is saying “eh, whatever” and just plugging shit in to make his messy, scratchy, lo-fi sounds and more like he’s intentionally doing things this way as a well-considered stylistic choice and carefully fashioning each “noisy” bit along the way. And now I’m thinking, hell, maybe with The Wiggins, he’s been doing that all along. Holy shit. My mind is now blown…