The xx arrive with their debut album 'xx' - a whole new sound of love, loss and longing. Gingerly dodging the storm cloud of hype hysteria that plagues seemingly every other new buzz act of the moment, Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim, Baria Qureshi and Jamie Smith are edging into our hearts. Their unique make-up is an inadvertent second nature marriage of 2009's urban/guitar tribes, in one corner fluttering new wave indebted reverberation, in the other, plumes of post-dubstep sub-bass and figuratively, their defining core of rich R&B vocal textures. If It all reads on paper like some potentially post-modern hotchpotch, then this makes their timeless results all the more alluring. The enveloping vocal partnership of Romy and Oliver is one that would've dropped-jaws in any decade this century, and set amidst a shivering soundscape of beats and plucks, their bedroom-reared concrete-soul is being justly heralded as the UK's most original and treasured alt.pop artifact of late.
Neither producer Jamie, nor keyboardist Baria would begrudge The xx story starting with their two fronting bandmates: the intimate spirit of their sound. Best friends from an early age, as Oliver notes, "We learned to speak together, and eventually, we'd one day coax one another into singing together." Having grown up together, the two softly-spoken introverts schooled each other musically via mixtapes and tentative stabs at their instruments (Oliver: bass, Romy: guitar). Romy's early obsessions with The Distillers and Tracy And The Plastics led her in and out of sticky mosh pits for much of her teens, whereas Oliver's schooling came courtesy of his sister, a US R&B diehard who kick-started his own obsession with the likes of TLC and Aaliyah (whose 'Hot Like Fire' his band would cover to sumptuous effect some years later). "We were too scared to sing to each other," mutters Oliver. "So we compromised by singing at the same time." They've rarely gone it alone since, with Jamie noting, "I've repitched them in the studio and it's actually spooky. They're basically the same voice. It's almost something instinctive."
At the formative stages of recording, early 2008, they worked with various producers they respected including Diplo, Lexx, and Kwes, who picked up on the band via a series of much-loved bedroom recordings posted online and an growing, devoted live following. But attempts to find anyone that could make them sound better than one of their own didn't go far; the band not wanting to draw too much distance from the DIY aesthetic of their early demos which were recorded in bedrooms through one in-built laptop mic, oddly by ripping the audio of video recording made on Photobooth. And so the stark, soulful blues of their debut album 'xx' took place under no one's watch other than Jamie, and engineer Rodaidh McDonald at XL Recordings' west London in-house studio. It's desirable to ignore the fresh, progressive twang of what they do and avoid using some convoluted new-fangled hyphen-strewn name to describe the sound of the record, lest we detract from the simplicity of what it does. A wash of sexy, coy, cold and sad rhythms and melodies.
The intro, into first track VCR, evokes a quitely emphatic tower-block cavalcade reminiscent of post-rock take on Mike Skinner's first work, punctured before long by twinkling bedroom guitar whispers born from a monochrome palette and what the album's producer terms "A belief that all space doesn't need to be filled." Debut single 'Crystalised' is as smooth and nonchalant as something off Genuine's R-Kelly produced cuts, with clean, crisp top-end strings as lost and alone as some of Romy and Baria's beloved Robert Smith. 'Islands' is gorgeous and cute huskiness, where muted frets skatter over a J Dilla pace. 'Shelter's bare-bones minimalism, where Romy assumes a soothing, spooky lead against seemingly singular, brittle strings. Future single 'Basic Space' is head-nod and playful as hell, swinging in the band's distinctive whispy groove, another surprising twist. While the majestic drips of fan-favorite 'Night Time' is quite simply the best kind of 'me and you against the world' song possible, with their centre-piece, the twin boy/girl voices encased in sweetness and flame, as enraptured as Tracy Thorn with Massive Attack. Before 'Stars' kisses goodnight, soft and sexy, sparse and brief, and before you know it they're gone, leaving a content peace, and a reminder that not only have you heard one of the album's of the year, but that thankfully, at least one this year's most important UK names is an easy one to remember.
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