The World Seems Lazy For The Newborn Baby

White Williams “Headlines” – The sort of shocking thing about White Williams is that the sophisticated, strangely ageless music contained on his first record was in fact written and performed by a 23 year old guy, and not, say, someone about two or three decades older. Or maybe someone from two or three decades ago? Williams’ music is often built upon scraps of familiar tunes by old family favorites — Bowie, Eno, T-Rex, and Neu! are all interpolated and integrated, and he straight up covers Bow Wow Wow — but Smoke is more than just another retro pastiche. The music seems as though it dropped out of time fully formed, as if it could’ve been written and recorded in 1977 just as easily as 2027. The deliberate nods to famous songs is obviously a self-conscious move, but the record’s loose, lucid, languorous tracks seem weirdly indifferent to both the past and the future, opting instead to zone out and groove along in the present tense. (Click here to buy it from Tigetbeat 6.)

Elsewhere: Prompted by my LCD Soundsystem post from yesterday, Mike Barthel wrote a nice long thing about “North American Scum,” and in giving it a fairly close reading manages to cover a lot of the things I either wanted to say or wish I’ve said about the song. I’m not especially happy with my post, honestly — I’ve been thinking about that song for months, and it didn’t really come out right, in part because I was too busy to really give it the time it needed. But, you know, a lot of the reason I wanted to write about it several months after its initial release in the first place was to push people to give it as much thought as “All My Friends” and “Someone Great,” and Mike certainly went above and beyond in his post, so I suppose it was a success in that way.

And: Once again, I will be filling in for the day on New York Magazine’s Vulture blog.