Words by Max Feldman
You press play. Somewhere you’ve heard this before. It’s frighteningly familiar. You’ve heard this caged intimacy before on Tricky records. You’ve heard this mournful reverie on Joy Division records. You’ve heard this barren refinement before in the sharp and thin guitars on The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds. These elements are put to fine use. Where other artists would pilfer and plagiarise, The xx provide a reasoned compromise between their variety of influences. Drum machines are married to aching guitar leads recalling Galaxie 500, while Romy Madley Croft’s vocals owe as much to Aaliyah as they do any sweater-chewingly introspective singer-songwriter. The former, meanwhile, influences the band to the point where “Hot Like Fire” is a generous bonus cut.
The xx’s debut album, XX, is a narcotic, gentle, dirge: a series of lullabies that sound as if they lament the death of youth. It might prove to be a valuable tool for 21st century living- an unruffled urban exorcism, cathartic and complex. “Fantasy” invokes the bus ride home, windows condensation-soaked, after a night at FWD. “Shelter” is as moody and protective as Massive Attack’s most heartfelt pleas for calm within furious inner city soundscapes. “Infinity” deserves to be remembered for that long.
20 -year-olds from South West London should not make records like this. They should be the sole reserve of grim country-blues singers, defying the stars from the bottom of a stiff measure of bourbon. Theirs is a soundtrack to a world punctuated by sirens, tannoys, and the clamour of the modern world threatening to harden your responses to the sort of subjects concerned here. “Night Time” sounds like the remnants of a lost late ’90s trance classic, the tender power of the guitar passage fueled by white lies rather than little white pills.
Maybe, then, we’re privileged to be exposed to talent like this without the pitiful aid of ITV. Maybe we’re simply unused to bands being consistent and challenging. Maybe we should nurture this act and pray they produce further gems. Maybe, just maybe, we’re not even being sentimental (Young Turks / XL, 2009).
