Glaswegian producer/DJ Alex Smoke (aka Alex Menzies) has never made techno you were supposed to dance to. In his more than decade-long career, his mixes and productions have veered far from the main drag of club and dancefloor appeal. More important for Smoke, in all of his work, was emotional exploration. It’s obvious that he has the disposition of a sensitive soul, and on his first outing with R&S Records, Love Over Will, Smoke swings for the fences, trying to complete a vision which could really create a puncturing and memorable experience.
Apparently the title of the album is a playful inversion of British occultist Aleister Crowley’s law of Thelema, a thoroughly ambiguous holy writ. In similarly opaque and broad terms, Smoke has described the album as "a statement on the times we are living in, but with an optimism relating to ways forward that are possible." But does he deliver on such lofty statements? Probably not, but in over 13 tracks and 33 minutes, Smoke tightly packs a myriad of concepts and ideas, ranging from ontology, loss love, the carceral state, and Edward Snowden. The resulting project is contemplative, relaxing, and elegant on a sonic level, but often uneven and clunky lyrically.
The unevenness comes from Smoke’s heavy reliance on his singing, which cannot carry the album's thematic weight. His vocals dominate, featuring in eight of the 13 songs. Throughout, he sings in a low register, mostly in a monotone, and his voice is always Auto-Tuned or pitch-adjusted. Sometimes the vocals are the perfect complement to his sparse, buoyant productions, and at other times they are far too brittle and inflexible to match the rich sounds around him. The freezingly tender and liquid wall of sound in the album’s opener, "Fair Is Foul," favorably recalls Mica Levi’s palette of quavering synths for Under the Skin, but the track is nearly ruined by the interjection of lines like "I never really care about you anyway/ You’re always on the way."
When his songwriting and singing fit together, Smoke comes very close to the emotional resonance he is striving for. In "LossGain," as he whispers "Don’t tell me how I feel when I’m myself," there is an aching sense of strength and affirmation amidst the melancholy. When he sings "All my atoms/ Struggling to fight them" in "All My Atoms," the blunt lyrics propel the energy of the song’s bright keys. Smoke is a sentimentalist at heart, and in the album’s best track, "Dust," he submits to old desires and calls out to a lover: "Don’t want to be with anyone else/ Don’t want to be separate."
Like Holly Herndon and Jam City, Smoke attempts to politically radicalize his music. Unlike the other two artists, he is hesitant to go full hog, and only devotes two tracks to explicitly political themes: "Fall Out" and "Yearning Mississippi." "Fall Out" is partially inspired by the trials and tribulations of hacker folk hero Edward Snowden. As he sings "you’ll never know they’re watching you...you’ll never even see," his voice is drowned out by a landscape of computer sounds, not unlike the ones featured in Laura Poitras' film about Snowden, Citizenfour. As the album’s final track, it serves as an almost cheerful acquiescence to the grand scariness of the surveillance state, in favor of ruminating on less dizzying concerns. For "Yearning Mississippi," he explored ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s Cultural Equity Archive and sampled prison songs from Mississippi. This is an interesting detail, but it would be impossible to notice on its own, making the potential critique of the prison system miss its mark.
Overall, Smoke still gets over on his ability to craft rich, moody soundscapes, although almost all the tracks on the album would have worked better as standalone instrumentals. Unlike his last project, Wraetlic, a woefully dreary and depressive piece, Love Over Will projects a hopeful sense of growth for Smoke. The sadness here is somehow more buoyant and more comforting. It leaves a kernel of warmth on otherwise very cold days.
