SMOKE SCREEN

Ohio transplant Joe Williams released his debut, Smoke, as White Williams late last year, and he’s been playing in the city nearly every week since. Early shows showed a young kid, unsmiling and severe behind a laptop, looking up only to sing blankly into a microphone; more recently, he’s stretched it out a bit more. Smoke makes his references clear (T. Rex, Blondie, the Talking Heads) and his aims clearer (a day that begins at sunset, a bit of danger, and a lot of glamour). This being New York, he’s found plenty of detractors. But Williams’s icy specificity and obvious ambition are two rare commodities in a yelpy indie-rock community where visible emotion and kitschy theater are the usual coin of the realm. He’s not much for confession, but that doesn’t make him insincere. With Lemonade, Leif, and DJ Rezound.

Mon., May 26, 8 p.m., 2008