Wavves Roll Into Toronto's NXNE Festival

Wavves do two things better than just about any other band playing this year's NXNE: play warp-speed garage punk and push peoples' buttons.

The trio did plenty of both when they took the stage at Toronto's Lee's Palace last night. The first five minutes of their set was almost like frontman Nathan Williams' personal game to see how impatient he could make the crowd before they played a single note.

They "checked" their mics repeatedly, asked for more and more reverb -- for a "lo-fi" band they were remarkably particular about their sound -- and made puns about smoking pot until it threatened to devolve into a repeat of their set at Primavera Sound last year where Williams, then backed by drummer Ryan Ulsh, famously invoked the wrath of the crowd by fussing with the stage sound for 15 minutes, mocking the crowd and only getting through a couple of songs before Ulsh left the stage in frustration.

Williams' new band -- who used to back Jay Reatard -- were initially willing to participate in the shenanigans, but eventually even they just wanted to get on with it.

Once they did, it was well worth the wait. They crashed through fan favourites like 'Weed Demon' and 'So Bored' with a reckless abandon that put the impatient crowd entirely on their side. They dropped in plenty of new songs, though they had to restart a couple because Williams was "thinking about Twitter." In the end their poppy, fuzzy tunes had the audience wrapped around their fingers.

It may be difficult to get past Williams' tendency to come off as bratty and uninterested in actually playing music on stage, but once played Wavves' songs are just too infectious to resist.