If Beck’s Midnite Vultures was made by a rowdy 23-year-old with a laptop and a penchant for languid beats, you’d get White Williams’ debut LP, Smoke. The album is aptly titled, with bright electro-blips and lazy guitar strums wrapping you in a Technicolor haze. With just a glance at the psychedelic camp of his cover art, it’s clear Williams has a taste for mocking the fashionable. “Headlines,” for example, is the first of several songs to mock the media and pop culture, with sing-songy grooves telling us to, "Climb all you can/ It's a killer stake/ We'll hang from the branches/ While the mayor dances/ In the headlines."
Fresh off a tour with fellow computer-music heroes Girl Talk and Dan Deacon, one would expect Williams’ record to be a crowd-moving feast of glitch beats and basslines. But, unlike the sweat-bath dance music of his tourmates, Smoke is, at best, the kind of album you’d put on to supplement the company of friends drinking PBR in your living room. Williams’ beats will certainly get your head bobbing, but they never add up to the get-off-your-feet climax you’ve come to know and love from other leisure-groove artists, like Fujiya & Miyagi.
It seems that Williams is an intellectual tinkerer, the type of artist who is more content playing Frankenstein with rhythms than playing songs to make the crowd break a sweat. And while these rhythms are certainly interesting — “In the Club” sounds like the message you’d hear while playing a cabaret record backwards — interesting doesn’t always equate with satisfying. Songs like “Going Down” creatively incorporate compositional devices like algorithmic generation, but these tracks ultimately feel as if they’re lacking a part or two. His cover of the ubiquitous “I Want Candy,” isn’t bad — which, I suppose, makes him better than most others who have covered it — but, like much of Smoke, the song still leaves you unsure as to why it was even written.
It’s only during the third-to-the-last track, “Fleetwood Crack,” when the album stops trying to impress you with its quirkiness and gets comfortable with itself. This is when the music becomes innovative, moving, and even beautiful — even within Williams’ own nonchalant-and-knows-it style. The mix of a slinking bassline, grimy vocals, and warm guitar flourishes cause your ears to perk up and your mind to realize that this is not simply a slowed-down version of Beck. “Route to Palm” shows the potential for the kind of sophisticated, dreamy dance beats of which Williams is capable, and closer “Lice in the Rainbow” perfectly exemplifies this: high-pitched keyboard blips scurrying in and out of measures of low-octave tones.
Williams, armed with a degree in graphic design, should be lauded for making an album that attempts to capture the eerie fantasticalness of pop culture. But while his contrived sonic and visual aesthetics do much to explain the thinness of Smoke, they do not justify it.