The xx are four
20-year-olds from South London who make predominantly slow, furtive pop
music, mostly about sex. They are also one of the stranger recipients of
UK hype in recent memory. They have no calling-card song; members of
the Pitchfork staff have ID’d no fewer than four songs (“Basic Space”,
“Crystalised”, “Islands”, “Infinity”) as “the one.” They are not fashion
plates, nor likely to be. Their list of influences is potent but
imperfect: Young Marble Giants (too shaggy and heavy-lidded); Japan (too
robust and theatric); Glass Candy (too quick and glammy). Without one
gimmick song they’ll never be able to reproduce, without an alternate
agenda, without a set-in-stone hip influence, the xx start to sound like
a real actual band, even if, after dozens of listens, it’s nearly
incomprehensible to think that a group so fresh-faced produced
xx.
Strongly influenced by modern R&B– the group made hay with an
early cover of Womack & Womack’s “Teardrops”, while UK copies of xx
come packed with their version of Aaliyah’s “Hot Like Fire”– the xx
use a drum machine to complement their copiously tidy compositions.
Unlike contemporary R&B fetishists Hot Chip or Discovery, who have
clearly spent long hours internalizing Timbaland, the Neptunes, and
other radio cognoscenti, the xx incorporate more abstract elements of
the genre: a liberal use of bass tones and an unwavering focus on sex
and interpersonal relationships.
Singer-guitarist Romy Madley Croft in particular seems all but
incapable of uttering a line that isn’t a come-on, a post-coital musing,
or a longing apology for a lack of one of the former. During “Islands”
or “Basic Space”, her voice takes on a pleasant soft-pop vibe, like
Stevie Nicks’. When Madley Croft sings, during “Shelter”, “Maybe I had
said/ Something that was wrong/ Can I make it better/ With the lights
turned on,” it’s unclear whether lights-turned-on activity is sex or…
something besides sex. She’s not some purring kitten, though, merely
reflective about a subject we don’t often associate with teenagers and
self-awareness.
Croft’s sparring partner, bassist Oliver Sim, usually fills in the
other spaces via either his responsive vocals or ever-present bass. (His
best trick: momentarily interrupting the divine verses of “Islands”
with four short thumbings). Sim’s voice, papery and affectless, is a
sticking point for some, but pop music has plenty of room for ugly male
voices, especially those with such pleasant friends. Importantly, both
Croft and Sim seem like they’re singing not because they have the best
voices but because they have the most to say (and, purely speculatively,
possibly to one another), something that would align them with an indie
rock tradition as long as the genre is old, (and folk and blues long
before that).
Their voices provide plenty of friction, however, in the context of
the xx’s slight, expert compositions. Working without a live drummer,
the xx manipulate airy, lingering negative space as well as any band
going. Initially hospital-tile sterile, xx rewards volume and
repetition like few other albums this year. Nudge the knob clockwise to
hear sparse guitars decay, bass notes wobble. Amid these delicate
environs, Croft and Sim can seem like they’re working on different
agendas, but the cagey back-and-forth on “Basic Space” is exquisitely
timed, and the lovers’ mumbles of “Heart Skipped a Beat”, over a
clacking drum machine, acquire their own weird logic. Jamie Smith (he of
the “Basic Space” remix) and Baria Qureshi are responsible for most of
the drums/loops/keyboards (and some of the guitars), and they’re adept
at knowing when to jump in, picking up “Stars” just as Sim seems to get
bored with it, spicing “VCR”, the band’s quaintest, simplest pop song
(“You/ You just know/ You just do”), with small xylophone melodies.
That all said, the record is not a complete break with recent sounds:
tune in during certain moments of “Crystalised”, and you’ll hear the
flecked, staccato guitars of Interpol. “Infinity”‘s slow-strummed
electric chords feel like late-period Radiohead. But xx is nervy
and self-contained, the product of a new band thinking a lot harder
about topics– sex, composition, volume– than we are accustomed to new
bands thinking. It is so fully formed and thoughtful that it feels like
three or four lesser, noisier records should have preceded it. The xx
didn’t need a gestation period, though xx is nuanced, quiet, and surprising enough that you might.
