Sound City, the rehearsal space where I play music, is an all-hours complex located in North Williamsburg near McCarren Park. Technically it is two conjoined buildings, with over thirty separate rooms and bands of every possible shape and temperament. Matt and Kim used to play here, so did Interpol and, according to the Sound City website, Biohazard. The rooms vary in size, but the walls are thin everywhere. If you share drywall with a metal band, or an industrial noise duo, or both like I do, you’re forced on many nights either to cut practice short, or engage in a kitchen-sink type loudness war on par with the final battle scene in Ernest Goes To Camp. Usually the other bands win.

Directly across the hall from my space, and sharing a wall with the same noise duo, lives a 30-year-old man who goes by Kikei. He has no affiliation with Sound City, and his own band, Living Days, rehearses at a different spot. He has lived in the complex by choice since February 2009, and with the management’s blessing since May 2009. ”Eric Clapton locked himself in a room for one year and played guitar, and this was my vision too,” he says.

The Miami native has floppy curly hair and thoughtful glasses. He favors button-down shirts and speaks in well-enunciated sentences with romantic tendencies. He sees bands break up regularly, often before they even get a chance to record. “There are songs from my New York experience I’ll never be able to hear again,” says Kikei. “I can only remember them, or hum them in my mind.”

Kikei goes to sleep around six in the morning, and wakes at around eleven or twelve. Bands rehearse throughout the day, but the building becomes quiet again around 1:30 at night. “When the place is empty, that’s when I play,” he says. “I’ll jam and I’ll go crazy here by myself. I have my good jam every day.” A bathroom outside the Sound City business office on the second floor has a shower head on a wall. Water goes all over the floor, but Kikei has his showers daily.

This past Saturday Kikei invited me into his room. It is a white-walled space with high ceiling painted blue, about 11 feet wide by 14 feet long. A twin mattress sits right on the carpet in the far corner, made up and with a considerable number of pillows on top. The room is clean, with keyboards and guitars along the walls and put away in their cases. There is a lava lamp in a different corner on the ground, and a small black and white Sony monitor that Kikei uses as a night table.

The room’s prominent piece is an enormous painting of an angel. It is about five feet wide by eight feet high, and takes up the entirety of one wall. The angel is naked, with large breasts that she covers up with her hands. Her head is thrown back as if she is being assumed back into the heavens. It was painted by Rado Ivanov, the charismatic Bulgarian artist who founded Sound City. “He never liked this painting,” Kikei says.

Two egg crate patches are glued on the other two walls, but they are useless against the outside sounds. The noise duo, a young This Heat-influenced band called Yvette, have just begun rehearsing. The drums seem to be setting off MIDI triggers, which let loose deep, long tremors that reach all the way out into Sound City’s loading dock. ”There is a horrible sound that they can make,” Kikei said. “It sounds like you’re hitting a hammer mallet against a metallic — no, it sounds like Wolverine slicing through metal.” The band has only released one seven-inch, but Kikei is able to hum their forthcoming discography. ”It feels like death creeping up on you,” he says. When it is just too much, he leaves the building and watches the Hasidic men play baseball across the street.

For the times he has no place to go, Kikei has invented what he calls the White Noise Solution. A vintage Fender amplifier someone left behind when moving out of Sound City is connected to his iPhone, which has a program called White Noise. “I pick the one that says airplane travel,” Kikei says. Suddenly the room fills with the thick sound of a plane engine cutting through the air. Kikei pays $950 a month to live in Sound City.

It can be scary at night, he says. “I was walking outside and I went to go to the bathroom. As I’m outside on the loading dock, I start to see these very big drops on the floor. I think it’s blood. It’s so vibrant, so fresh. I start to see this huge trail of blood on the floor. I’m walking, following this trail. These drops are just getting bigger and bigger. They were thick. They had hills. They were hills of puddles. I get to the bathroom and it’s just blood everywhere. I have the pictures. Want to see them?”

Kikei detaches his iPhone from the amplifier. The photos are of the first-floor bathroom, the one most tenants use. The sink and floor are soaked, even the mirror and toilet seat. The amount of blood is mesmerizing. “That was the first thing that made me feel like maybe I’m not living in the best place,” Kikei says. This September, he hopes to move in with his older brother in West Village.

Photo courtesy of Kikei.

Today I revisited the California mall-punk band Offspring’s Smash LP. This thing came out in 1994 and, riding the coattails of grunge, sold over three million in the US and two million in Australia. It had “Self Esteem” and “Come Out And Play”, also known as “Keep ‘Em Separated” in like a “Baba O’Riley”/”Teenage Wasteland” kind of way. I remember finally getting my hands on a copy just a week before the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995, and later watching a friend’s father try to snap it in half at his son’s first boy-girl birthday party.

This was strictly a work-related venture vis a vis the new Wavves album, which I’ll explain in a second. But what you should know upfront is this:

I am of a generation of recreational rock critics who believe guitars almost always sound better when played through chorus effect. When I first heard King of the Beach, the Cali lo-fi punk act Wavves’s wildly celebrated new album, I admit to being short-circuited. This was what rock music felt like when I was 13 and regularly practiced stage dives onto my bedroom mattress. The record had been tracked by an actual engineer in an actual studio, produced by an actual producer, and performed by an actually competent backing band — just like an “actual-fi” or “fi-fi” rock record from back in the day.

Wavves, a/k/a Nathan Williams, told The Fader he thought Beach might be his Nevermind, a polished follow-up for a larger audience. The record would prove that his songwriting could “handle” professional quality production. In addition to grunge, the record has sunny pop songs that borrow moves from ’60s girl-group music and ’00s “future-primitive” indie rock that itself borrows moves from ’60s girl-group music. The producer, Dennis Herring, knew which frequencies to pull down when equalizing Williams’s nasally voice, and apparently refused to remedy Williams’s bad takes with distortion and reverb. Instead, Herring demanded better performances. The record took them three months to make and — perhaps benefiting from the contrast to Wavves’s unlistenable previous albums and the leagues of lo-fi charlatans out there for whom music exists mostly as a mating ritual — it does sound like someone in the room actually cared that his name was on the sleeve this time.

My guess is you don’t want to be dragged through the musicological reasons why I find these songs so unsatisfying, how they’re lacking in anything that remotely resembles swagger. Really it doesn’t take much to become King of The Beach, or whatever shorthand we’re using here to describe the rash of solipsistic slacker internet type bands who are ‘bored’ and ‘remember slap bracelets’ and ‘don’t give a shit’ and ‘hate themselves but who’s to blame’, as if mea culpa ever counts for self-awareness.

Instead let’s talk about the persona of Nathan Williams, a 24-year-old man whose lyrics move from teenage fantasy (“you’re never gonna stop me!”) to pre-teen rebellion (“I could say I’m sorry… but it wouldn’t mean shit!”) to a kind of infantile neediness (“I never wanna leave home, Everything in the back of my brain/ told me that I would be sick/ when I’m out there”). These are tough themes to pull off but they’ve been pulled off before, if only because there’s a difference between directness and artlessness. There’s also a difference between self-loathing, which Williams thinks he’s up to, versus self-pity, which is all I’m hearing. Here is a 24-year-old man who sings with a straight face, “Misery, will you comfort me in my time of need?” A 24-year-old man who fundamentally misunderstands what made fellow lowlife Kurt Cobain so great — not the navel-gazing, but the umbilical noose.

It’s the same sort of vapid I felt re-listening to Offspring. “Self-Esteem” was so desperate to tap into “Teen Spirit” that it couldn’t help itself from stealing the riff’s very rhythm. This was second-rate grunge/punk fifteen years ago — and yet everything about “Smash” is less irksome to me than Williams’s borrowed nostalgia. The progressions are smarter, the lyrics are wryer, the record itself was better produced, which is supposed to be Wavves’ ace in the hole here. Who knows how this piece would have turned out if I had remembered Silverchair in time!

Anyway, the more you suffer, the more it shows you really care, right? If people want to pretend like they’re 13 years old again and break into the neighbor’s pool to the sweet sound of “Post Acid”, fine by me. I patiently await a band that pillages the part of late ’80s/early ’90s rock that wasn’t the self-absorbed binky rock that made me cringe even then.