Spawned from the boredom of Bleeding Knees Club frontman Alex Wall, Wax Witches' debut album, Celebrity Beatings, is a homage to his American heritage and love affair with Californian punk and psychedelic music. Wall takes a bratty approach to hardcore punk, keeping the short-and-fast element but swapping integrity for tongue-in-cheek wailing. It sits somewhere between Descendents and Black Flag, with the attitude of a restless teenager and the signature haziness of noise-pop.
The track list for Celebrity Beatings is riddled with misspellings and colloquialisms that would be found in the vocabulary of an angsty youngster, and the content is not much different. “I don't wanna be like you” is sung with a snotty immaturity in Ballad Of A Lozer (sharing the replaced letter 'z' from an 's' with psychedelic interlude, LZD). Like the majority of the album, the lyrics are sung with a laziness that mimics the disinterested musings of Wall.
“Nothing worse than being fucking spat on in the face/Fuck it” are the words that are drawled out in the opening track Spit On Me. The monotonous 18 seconds of drawn-out bass eventuating into a sudden burst of fast drumming and guitar-playing sounds near identical to Black Flag's No More – but maybe that's the point. Wall proudly wears his influences, with track six being a cheeky cover of Black Flag's Nervous Breakdown.
This is the kind of album you'll either love or you'll hate. There's a charm about the facetiously exaggerated punk attitude, but the purposely-offensive nature of the record can't be taken too seriously.
