Day Four of Chicago’s Tomorrow Never Knows festival in 2008 was clearly scheduled to be the repository night for all the acts they wanted to book for cred’s sake yet couldn’t quite make fit under the broad and elastic and even threadbare umbrella of “indie rock.” It should have worked — a recipe for a Saturday night bacchanal made up of Ecstatic Sunshine’s droney bits to get the place warm, Ohmega Watts and Cadence Weapon’s exquisitely cool indie hip-hop to provide the meat in the middle, and White Williams’s candy-coated pastiche beats to simultaneously rave the place up and cool it back down once we’d all had our fill. If only it had come together so holistically.

For one thing, as a venue, Schuba’s just doesn’t have the right kind of aura to make the above-mentioned series of acts feel energetically organic to the room. The bill would have been a natural at the Empty Bottle (even the Double Door could have done something with it), but Schuba’s is weirdly somehow not nearly dark enough, and the railroad car shape of the place, which can be so effective in helping slingshot the sound of a bitchin’ guitar tone or a jangly piano line all the way to the back wall, didn’t have the big-ass’d expansiveness the hip-hop and electronic beats needed to embrace the place with groove. The audience felt lean and (up)tight, like baby birds looking expectantly at the stage waiting for some sustenance to be tossed to us, rather than simmering low, wide, and loose, creating our own symbiotic party loop that would have fed back in equal measure on the performers’ contributions to the overall vibe.

That being said, Cadence Weapon probably succeeded best of anyone that night, thanks to his improbable yet remarkable bearing as some kind of beautiful, coldly aggressive punk rock robot of hip-hop. With his DJ behind him wearing a red lucha libre mask and spinning the chopped, diced, and processed beats from Breaking Kayfabe and the upcoming Afterparty Babies, the once and future Rollie Pemberton got his call and response on with the bile-fueled chant of “I made a deal today / I’m selling real estate” and took at least half a dozen trips down off the stage and through the crowd, not so much connecting with us while he was down there as checking up, keeping us honest. He’s an intelligent, magnetic performer, not necessarily hindered by the relative weaknesses of a room as he takes his stand and makes his mark.

On the heels of this, White Williams fared inexplicably much worse. It’s not exactly clear to me even now what was happening—or rather, not happening—but all I know is that the room probably could have been measured in kelvin, so chill was the air, and not in the good stoner way, or even a dead of winter in Chicago kind of way. Williams’s 2007 debut Smoke had always left me a bit unsatisfied and unimpressed, and I’d been eager to see in what way its tunes might be redeemed for me live. (And I admit I’m an easy target—almost anything can be redeemed for me live, such is the unique power of people gathered together to watch other people gathered together to play music at a specific place and time.) But nearly all of what I personally perceive as the album’s faults were magnified that night—the hollowness of the canned beats that seem hesitant to commit to full-on, crap-ass plasticky shlockiness or, failing that, at least a sense of humor about their hollowness; the songs’ melodic simplicity lacking even the dreamed-up-in-my-bedroom charm that can usually elevate a scattershot beginner’s effort; not to mention Williams’s own emotionally vacant persona. He’s, obviously and rightly, been compared and contrasted elsewhere to former tourmates Dan Deacon and Girl Talk, manic, musical everydudes who leave all but a pint of blood on the floor over the course of a set, and emotional deadness can often serve as a breathlessly thrilling affect if it goes far enough, in a Stanley Kubrick kind of way, to force us to acknowledge the vacuums in our own hearts. But there was more of a Crispin Glover thing going on here, with Williams as enfant terrible of the melodica, flanked by a guitarist and bass player who seemed to be doing a self-serious and thus unintentionally hilarious version of those frozen-faced ladies with the red lipstick and tight dresses from all those old ’80s Robert Palmer videos.

To his credit, “Going Down,” with its now seemingly omnipresent Afrobeat bounce, came off rather well, and someone, or a few someones, in the crowd were evidently affected enough by what was happening in the room, either for good or for ill, to be driven to flout Chicago’s recently instated smoking ban by lighting up a cigarette and then, a few minutes later, a joint. Perhaps taking that as some sort of cue, Williams cut the rest of the set a bit short, almost like a musical Rumpelstiltskin who, having finally been confronted with the truth of his real name, vanishes into thin air.

White Williams’ Daytrotter Session
Cadence Weapon Official Site