Having never heard of White Williams until this here album, one can only suspect a fondness for Brian Eno without certainty, save for the proof in the pudding. Williams’ Smoke is forever in debt to various aspects of Eno’s early art pop recordings or, at the least, the innovations of Eno’s brand of skewed pop. After all, the queer synth-pop of album opener “Headlines” could just as easily be clipped from any number of British LPs circa 1980. But it’s that intangible quality that points to Eno above others (save maybe Bowie) and that makes a number of these tracks reek of Here Come the Warm Jets.
The intangible seems like a large part of Williams’ attack. Or rather, it seems Williams has an appreciation for the unpredictable, uncertain and imperfect. And there’s his real link to Eno, the kind of fella who adheres to those as ideas as means for finding artistic impetus. Throughout Smoke, Williams attempts to touch on that belief by imbuing his electronic tunes with an organic human touch.
Williams goes about this in several ways. One trick he uses is the interpolation of recorded sounds into a track, a technique founded by dub producers (and employed by another point of reference for Williams, Arthur Russell). Simply, there’s a sort of cut ‘n’ paste aesthetic going down during some of these tunes. The album’s title track seems to have some of this going on, sudden riffs and figures that appear out of thin air and vanish back into the electronic ether. At least half the time, the album goes for a more “live recorded” sound, which makes his sonic reordering and shuffling an interesting contrast.
Elsewhere, Williams hones his unpredictability with noise flourishes, algorithm-generated sounds and a rather limp cover of “I Want Candy.” Tunes like the wonky “In the Club” attempt to merge big Malkmus riffs and tittering Sly and the Family Stone drum machines into an odd concoction that lives somewhere between Wowee Zowee and Spiderman of the Rings. The kraut affections of “New Violence” expand on the unspoken connection between Baltimore’s Dan Deacon and Williams, a relation maintained by the upbeat sensibilities and willfully eccentric electronic fuckery that appear common to each artist.
Unlike Deacon though, Williams doesn’t seem so bent on bizarre. Williams is definitely stricken with pop song form, in spite of his outre impulses. Which is not to say that Williams can’t be garishly pop in the same way Deacon’s tunes can become garishly eccentric. The album art at least alludes to the sense of gaudy glamor of Williams’ pop-centric musical philosophy, so it shouldn’t be without warning. And in that sense, maybe the key difference between the two is the fact that one could imagine Williams actually breaking into the mainstream at some point in his career, while it’s hard to imagine Deacon as anything but a loveable fringe character.
But I digress. Smoke is a bit hit and miss with its experimentation, sometimes seemingly hesitant to commit to pop accessibility or electronic experimentation. But I guess that’s what makes it art pop.
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