The XX The XX (Young Turks)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
The XX have been thinking about this album for a long time. That’s why there’s a song on it called ‘Intro’. That’s why they’re still a band after meeting way back in nursery school. That’s why everything on it sounds so wonderfully considered.
Considered, yes, but not overcooked. The XX is pretty much raw, and at times like ‘Fantasy’ barely even there, thriving in virtue of its near-nothingness. It’s the kind of music that will infuriate “proper” musicians (a clan who in my experience can certainly play but rarely write good music), as it really does sound like anyone could make an album like this. I could, you could. But we don’t. We’ve got our jobs or our studies or our girlfriends and we don’t have the time to. I don’t have a sequencer. Your voice isn’t that good. Our mate’s bass has only got three strings on it and we’ve not got time to go down to Denmark Street in our lunch break to pick him up that bottom ‘E’ and anyway he’s meeting up with what’s her name this evening and OH they’re going to see The XX, who can actually be bothered to make the brilliant music we think we’re all capable of. But we aren’t. Because this is really special.
It cries out for huge remix treatment, for these choruses to be repeated ad infinitum rather than the mere two times they appear per song, but The XX’s appeal lies in the fragility of these songs as they are, not in their potential to be anything else. Anyone who knows how a pop song is put together will recognise that these eleven tracks are beautiful instances of that unfairly maligned medium; they’re just stripped of anything that makes pop music the brash, brazen, bullshit it so often gets turned in to in the hands of people who don’t really have any love for it. It has an honest beauty and weighty melancholia, like looking at a supermodel with her makeup off, shivering as she waits for a bus.
Brittle though it may first appear, the more time you give it the more you’ll realise the capabilities of this skeleton of a record. It can enforce everything from crying over nothing (‘Shelter’) to celebratory shape throwing (the exquisite ‘Basic Space’) without ever shifting from its particularly downbeat, couldn’t give a f**k delivery, or smiling, once. And yes, it is samey. Its variations of pace are practically non-existent. It admits of no happiness, other than that to be found in a drum sample with precisely the right amount of reverb on it (though I grant there is a lot of happiness to be found in that). But as we began to describe, The XX have a reason for everything sounding like it does here. The explanation is that everything sounds just perfect, doesn’t it? It’s as if the initial blueprints were so beautiful that they never even bothered building the thing.
Artists in this article: The XX
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