The WAEVE have been a thing since 2021. They have had the time to figure out how to be a band. Instead, they have the concept of a good band. The problem here is that they don’t really know what they want to be, and I feel like that issue stems from their origin. Blur’s guitar whiz Graham Coxon met Rose Elinor Dougall in a pub and bought her a drink. Then they did a charity show, separately, after the city of Beirut was brutalized by that explosion. Then they thought hey why don’t we try writing some songs together. Now here we are, two albums later, with a lot of good ideas but not enough coherency to give them a specific signature sound.

They’ve vaguely settled down on post-punk, which makes sense as a lot of British bands have been doing the same thing lately. The issue there is that post-punk is a wide, big-tent sort of label. So, under the same banner you can get the hard-charging New Wave bangers like “City Lights” and “Broken Boys”, but also sleepy wispy folkie numbers like “I Belong To…” and “Simple Days.” “Song For Eliza May” fits somewhere in the middle, like a particularly artsy Siouxsie Sioux deep cut. Some songs have Coxon’s instantly recognizable guitar lines, but he’s also now playing sax apparently, and can be heard blowing it throughout. A lot of the bass lines, fittingly for post-punk, feel very Cure-esque, but Coxon is not Robert Smith and cannot sell it as convincingly as he might otherwise. Dougall fares better but a lot of the softer, slower tracks doze off mid way through. In the end, a lot of City Lights feels like material put together to support a core handful of good songs, material that explores what the band might mean but ultimately never lands on anything solid.