Strange times, duly noted.

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Tuesday, 18 August 2009

Review: The xx - 'xx' (Young Turks)


....You know you’re getting older when a new band cites The Sugababes and Aaliyah as two of their key influences.
Based on that, you might expect The xx - yes, it is a very silly name - to be standard chart-fodder, that everyone will have forgotten in about a week’s time (I would name some bands at this point, but I have forgotten their names. You see?). However, there is much more to them than an off-the-cuff Mariah Carey reference on their Myspace page. As other reviewers have cleverly pointed out, they’ve clearly been listening to The Cure circa ‘Seventeen Seconds’; The Jesus And Mary Chain circa ‘Darklands’; and whole a lotta Burial. And it shows. So what have they created here? Doom-pop? Goth-step?

With such a diverse range of influences, you might expect their debut to be a little over-fussy. In fact, they’ve gone in the other direction, creating a skeletal, barely-there sound which is nonetheless thoroughly immersive, and frequently verges on being very special indeed. Actually I’d go so far as to argue that the middle triumvirate here – ‘Heart Skipped A Beat’, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Shelter’ – are flawless. And the rest of the album comes eye-wateringly close too. The singles ‘Basic Space’ and ‘Crystalised’ combine tired boy-girl vocals and minimal guitar lines beautifully; the former sounding like ‘Close To Me’ on a double-strength dose of Nytol. Most of the songs on this album come across as half-finished, like demos, and they stop unexpectedly with little fanfare. Yet there is a real freshness about this sound – it’s bleak, yes, but it’s pop music, when all is said and done, and it’s pulled off with considerable panache.

Very rarely is a debut album perfect though, and this collection has a couple of flaws. Firstly, some of the lyrics are rather simple, verging on the banal; noticeably average. Sure, I guess you could argue that creating atmosphere is more important here, but I’d still prefer something to get my teeth into. And occasionally the vocals veer into show-off territory – I’d much prefer a ‘high’ than a ‘high-ee-i-ee-iiigh..’, for example. It just doesn’t fit with the band’s less-is-more aesthetic, and it grates; at their worst, The xx sound like a heavily-sedated Subways. However, on the vast majority of ‘xx’, they sound an awful lot like that darned elusive Future Of British Pop – slinky, nervy and extremely damn tuneful to boot. This is an excellent debut, but it's an album to build on rather than rest on. The future is bright for this band - even if they don’t seem to think so.
(8/10)

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