The Waeve: City Lights – Album Review

Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall return with their second album as The Waeve and shower us with golden nuggets that cross boundaries and transcend genres.

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When great minds collide there is usually an explosion of creativity that sees both pulling each other higher, pushing each other into territories that, alone, neither would probably explore. With The Waeve, that is exactly what we find Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall doing as they return with City Lights. It’s an album that sees them untethered from any preconceptions that may have once tied them down to their previous works. That freedom to explore where they choose has resulted in an album that skits across glam, psych, dream-pop, electro, and new-wave, like magpies building their personal home from shiny found trinkets, the details combining to create a spellbinding whole.

They dive straight into the opening title track with a verve and swagger that oozes Low-era Bowie, Coxon sounding like a newly empowered Byran Ferry as his trademark wired guitar wails in the perfect moments to escape from the bounding bass line that runs beneath. It’s a hard thing to say looking back on his many albums and projects, but on first listen this may just be one of the best songs he’s ever recorded. Trust me. Throw in a sax solo and we’re flying. It’s a song that sets the sonics straight from the off, City Lights, come what may after, is an album to be reckoned with.

As the pair join hands and lead you through their adventure, it is often the interplay of their vocals that proves to be the strongest of all and the album is littered with it, from the gloriously pulsating You Saw to the jaunty folk of Girl Of The Endless Night, one of the few songs that hark back to Coxon’s Spinning Top and Crow Sit On Blood Tree, until of course Dougall joins, her vocals raising the song up into the light. She does this on many occasions throughout the album, each time mesmerising in its own right.

On Simple Days, her melody drifts over a dreamy acoustic guitar on the album’s most beautiful moment while on Song For Eliza May, another folk backdrop, she brings a restrained strength to her delivery, perfectly pitching it as the songs shift gear midway through to bring in expansive strings that unwind beneath, a prelude to Coxon’s unravelling guitar solo that comes surging forth, a better homage to Neil Young’s unhinged solos you’ll not hear this year. Again, it’s in the combination of all these elements that they find their identity. That search for identity flows from the lyrics as well through tales of neurosis and a search for balance, a need for someone to ground the other as they sing of endless nights and broken people, of wasted time and a burning desire simply to connect and feel.

What’s clear coming out the other side of City Lights, is that as a duo, The Waeve refuse to be pinned down and pigeon-holed. From songs like Moths To The Flame with a groove like Howard Devoto on a full-on new-wave electro kick, Coxon’s phrasing at times fully revealing his more post-punk side, to the pure loungeroom-psych of album closer Sunrise, a song that spirals to a dizzying string-laden crescendo, City Lights is a smorgasbord of delights.

City Lights by The Waeve is available from Sister Ray.

The Waeve are online, on Instagram, X, Spotify, and Bandcamp

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Words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.

Nathan also presents From The Garage on Louder Than War Radio every Tuesday at 8pm. Tune in for an hour of fuzz-crunching garage rock ‘n’ roll and catch up on all shows on the From The Garage Mixcloud playlist.