Nam Wayne – Nam Wayne (Album Premiere)
Listen to Nam Wayne's self-titled debut album in full a week ahead of release
Nam Wayne is a Philadelphia tape-rocker and reverb junkie of Scottish Vietnamese ancestry. Wayne began writing his self-titled debut album back in 2005, intending to give it a rough charm by finishing the entire thing in one week. But a number of factors – including tape equipment failures, a drummer’s coma and convalescence, the economic downturn, the recent vinyl manufacturing bottleneck, and Wayne’s meticulousness – delayed its completion by twelve years until now. As it turns out, the delay is just long enough for Decade of Darkness, the album’s resident Bush-era protest song, to become a period piece that is ominously relevant once again.
As a result of the lag the album traces the changing times. Falling on the Waves captures the moment when it became clear that public phones were obsolete, Feelin’ Fine is a post-market-crash survival song from when Wayne was scraping by serving hors d'oeuvres to Donald Trump and Arianna Huffington amid the inescapable strains of corporate pop music. Eighth Grade Enchantress, which features a medieval crumhorn sampled on a Casio SK-1, was inspired by a young prodigy who became a lifelong friend.
Wayne constructed the recordings like musical versions of Star Wars props, composing the lyrics carefully, deliberately, but then figuratively slopping them with dirt and partially obscuring them with shadows and motion-blur. He did much of the recording in altered states but edited the performances with surgical sobriety. The drums were recorded on two inch tape but everything else was recorded on multitrack cassette, for a haloed, disintegrating feel.
“I want you to hate this record and then love it,” Wayne tells The Skinny. “I want you to badmouth it to all your friends and then suddenly realise months later that there's an empty space in the universe in the exact shape of this music. I want you to have to take sides against your own better judgement and your opinions about the world in order to embrace something more expansive and problematic. My goal was to make a record with teeth, something free spirited in a real and committed sense. That's what I think rock music is about.”
Nam Wayne is set for release on 9 Feb. If you happen to be in New York on that very same date, you can catch Wayne's album release show at The Gutter in Brooklyn