Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, lead singers of The xx.
“Someone, somewhere, was so moved by this band that they couldn't stop talking about it,” Mike Conklin wrote of The xx in last week's L Magazine. “It's neither that person's fault, nor the fault of the band, that other people have knee-jerk reactions, positive or negative, to the excitement of others. The onus is on us, now more than ever, to be diligent about making sure our opinions are fully formed before we share them.”
In other words, The xx—any band—are whatever you want to make of them, but it may take you several weeks or months to decide. Unfortunately, the Internet wants you to make snap decisions and share them in a jiffy, either because other people are counting on you, because you feel you have to in order to be “in,” or because you want to get people to start counting on you. I think a lot of us writers feel we're in all three of those categories. So, on that note.
It's a strange time for the xx. The foursome of 20-year-olds just temporarily or permanently lost its fourth member, second guitarist Baria Qureshi, who claimed exhaustion upon returning to the U.K. after a string of organized and impromptu CMJ performances. Before they even arrived in the States, bassist and vocalist Oliver Sim seemed to foreshadow fame's toll with a single tweet: “[O]fficial jetsetter,” he wrote on September 11th. “[I] dont want to leave my room now let alone the country, reclusiveness just isn't an option anymore.”
It sure isn't, but there seemed to be a smile creeping into the statement. While the band might have been happy playing poorly-lit venues in middle-of-the-country towns, suddenly finding themselves shipped off to the continent and the other side of the pond for a tour schedule that Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal said “makes me feel a bit light-headed” is still rather wonderful. And it's not like they have a choice. The supply isn’t the album anymore, even if this band churns out what is ostensibly a studio recording on stage. The supply is the show, and it’s in serious demand.
If the live show is indeed, as many claimed last week, just another listen of the album, it at least isn’t a .rar file. It’s a physical album with a few very valuable bonuses enclosed in its jewel case or record sleeve. (I should add that last week, I watched a tall, thin man strut confidently out of Other Music in the rain, carrying an xx LP under his arm.) On stage, the chemistry between Sim and Romy Madley Croft simmers on low interminably. The songs sparkle a little brighter and set a little firmer in our echoic memory with help from visuals: Croft peers out from under a wave of jet-black hair to watch Sim finish his solo, or vice versa: Sim, head down, gazes boldly from under his brow, waiting for Croft’s cue (see: Figure 1). Their voices meld into each other's seamlessly, though of course, because their singing often sounds like a sigh or a yawn, there's little room for mistakes, or at least, it’s impossible for us to hear them.
The songs can feel like a warm breath on your neck or a cold draft up your shirt, but each one is infused with lust, so even the dankest, most desperate atmosphere on the album—the bitcrushed, glittery effects at the start of “Night Time,” or the Burial-like somberness of Sim’s solo, “Fantasy,” have longing stamped firmly upon them, and they glow and pulse—“Fantasy” quite literally pulses—with that brimming emotional intensity otherwise known as adolescence.
It’s not all a masterpiece, which accounts for the impatience and skepticism that some people first feel about xx (or still feel, those jerks). “VCR” is slow, bare and timid, and listening to it can feel like driving behind an elderly person. Even “Shelter,” a song whose melody is so fetching that it haunts another track (“Fantasy”), takes time to develop in the ear, feeling a tad slow, lyrically awkward (“Maybe I had said / something that was wrong”), and almost too personal. But the song keeps oozing out its power. It's a cryptic little note of apology that deserves the listener’s concentration and curiosity.
As for the best tracks, “Crystallized” is one of several exemplary uses of the female-male duet. In what I imagine to be a conversation between a boy and girl who communicate well in bed but poorly outside it, Croft and Sim overlap each other with words that sound similar but hold completely different meanings. She says, “Glaciers have melted to the sea,” wanting to be a glacier herself, free from the heat of passion. He says, “Things have gotten closer to the sun,” admitting things have gotten hot, maybe too hot. But eventually they meet in the same place, with him proving his feelings in his own sweet time and both of them declaring, to themselves or each other, “Go slow.”
The video for "Crystallized":
On “Basic Space,” the boy-girl exchange becomes new lovers’ banter. Live, it’s a riveting little number that Croft shyly handles from the shadows of the stage. To clattering, tropical percussion, Sim sing-speaks in playful, syncopated starts and stops: “Neck, chest, waist to floor / easy to take, you could take me in fours / make me a deal, a day a piece / take it all, just stay a week,” to which Croft happily responds, “I’ll take you in pieces / we can take all apart.” And so on.
The video for "Basic Space":
“Infinity,” with a guitar that croons like Chris Isaak’s on “Wicked Game,” features a sensual, sad exchange about a breakup (or is it?): “I can’t give it up / to someone else’s touch / because I care too much,” Croft says, climbing a scale breathlessly. Later, she and Sim's words dance soberly around the heartbeat pluck of her guitar, Sim’s bass, and the increasingly vicious, tinselly clap of percussion. “I can’t give it up,” she keeps saying, weakly. Sim insists, hauntingly and just a little more sure of himself than she, “Give it up.”
