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As album covers go, it’s a disconcerting one – two women, one who appears to be dressed in a shellsuit, the other in a chiffon curtain, smoking a leopard-skin hookah pipe and crying rainbow tears. The music within isn’t quite as off-the-wall as this image would suggest, but White Williams AKA Brooklyn one-man-band Joe Williams certainly throws some colourful sounds into his heady mix of electro and lo-fi glam.
‘Headlines’ heralds a promising start with swathes of bubbly synth and energetic disco beats, whilst ‘In the Club’ is a fuzzed-up glam strut, the self-assured lovechild of Marc Bolan and a cheap drum machine. The single ‘New Violence’ zips past in an economical two and a half minutes, catchy, sprightly and very close to a perfect pop single. The spectre of New Order hangs over the trebly lead bassline and crisp guitars of ‘Violator’ but it’s here that Williams’ vaguely monotone paper-thin croon (which bears a striking similarity to that of Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor) begins to grate, his rather weedy delivery suggesting that he recorded all the vocals in the reference section of a library.
The frankly agonising ‘Lice in the Rainbow’ is the only misstep in a fairly consistent first half, amounting to nothing more than three and a half minutes of horrible high-pitched bleeps and a serious waste of your listening time. So far, so reasonable then, you might conclude – that is until the feeble duo of ‘Smoke’ and ‘Danger’ rear their ugly bonces and the record begins its swift descent into sonic self-pleasuring. The former is a laborious slap-bass tripefest whilst the latter mistakes tuneless meandering for experimentation. The intention seems to be that Hoxton hipsters will click their basketball boot-clad heels with glee at the ‘difficult’ and ‘challenging’ nature of the music. Poor, deluded sods.
The closing, languid Hawaiian surf of ‘Route to Palm’ is sweet relief after the tapestry of non-music that preceded it, but this is all too little, too late so save what is ultimately a patchy document of wasted potential and doubtless Nathan Barley’s record of the year.
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