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For the former drummer in a Cleveland noisecore band called USA Crypt, 24 year-old laptop auteur Joe Williams sure knows how to unwind. The 24 year-old – a former touring buddy of DJ Gregg Gillis (Aka Girl Talk) – has created an album so enthralled by the titular smoke that at times its difficult to keep your eyelids propped open – but, if you can concentrate long enough, there's enough of interest here to keep even the most narcoleptic electro fan happy for days.
Very similar in style to Beck's underrated 'Midnite Vultures', 'Smoke' sees Williams grab huge handfuls of funk, glam rock, glitchy punk and beatific electro and hurl them into a copy of Pro Tools, to spewed out as lovingly crafted and richly detailed revivals of genres you thought were deader than Amy Winehouse's wedding vows. But, despite there being the nagging feeling that you've heard everything that Williams has to say in a hundred better records, repeated listens unlock subversive details that make 'Smoke' much more than just a tribute album.
Opener 'Headlines' could be an offcut from LCD Soundsystem's 'Sounds of Silver' – a slowburning indie stomp which references now sadly-defunct Manchester laptop pioneers Alpinestars. Such is its debt to James Murphy's planet-straddling behemoths, especially recent single 'All My Friends', that it's a relief that the second song is a glammed-up Beck sleaze-fest 'In the Club'. Combining arch wit with a kind of detached cool that Julian Casablancas can only dream of, Williams drawls "You put your hand on me/ I'll put my hands on you… You'll mop the floor with me" in such a lascivious way that you feel like you're being slowly dry-humped by Cheech and Chong. This is in no way a bad thing – Williams deliberately evokes the sweat and smoke of a mid 1970s funk club to great effect, and any cheese factor is circumvented by a kind of ironic aloofness that permeates great swathes of 'Smoke'.
'Violator' doffs its cap to 'Hunky Dory' era Bowie and Talking Heads' 'Psycho Killer', with a twangy bassline so funky that you'd be excused for missing the sweetly innocent guitar lines and keyboard noises that make the song – whatever the hell he's singing about – sound vaguely regretful. Similarly, title track 'We Know the Shadows' is, on first listen, a directionless pastiche of all of the worst funk/electronic hybrid excesses of the 80s – but it all begins to make sense after a couple of listens – a very modern indie sensibility begins to assert itself as the chorus kicks in. Best of all is single 'New Violence', which comes on like The Strokes and morphs into a version of Beck's 'Devil's Haircut' with a pounding kickdrum. Beg, borrow or illegally download a copy – this should, if there's any justice in the world, blare out of every festival sound system this summer.
Williams drops the ball spectacularly on a few moments. 'Lice In The Rainbow' is a self-consciously trippy three-an-a-half minutes of screeching electronic noises – completely out of pace with the rest of the album, and likely to give anyone foolhardy enough to listen to it on the tube a splitting headache. 'Danger', part of a third act that fails to elicit much excitement, is a lazy and repetitive exercise is stoner mood music which misses its target by some margin, and title track 'Smoke' is as difficult a listen as any of Roxy Music's synth-enamored mid-80s work.
Williams is ploughing a new and interesting furrow – his uber-hip revivalism of dated trends seems to have won him a huge amount of support on the indie blogs, and there are flashes of true genius here hidden amongst some very self-consciously ironic work. When he's good, he's great – 'New Violence' especially, and even when he isn't, he's still worth listening to. Perhaps, by laying off the smoke of the album's title he may follow this up with something remarkable.
