The XX

hmm...this is one of those ILX things that sort of fascinate me, like i am totally mystified by the love for this.

― President Emeritus, Fancy Chord Club (M@tt He1ges0n), Monday, September 14, 2009 7:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

based on the two BORING ASS songs at the top of the thread this. theres gotta be better stuff to hone yr critical chops on people jesus

reminds meeeeeeeee of shiny toy guns actually

listening to shelter, theres something here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIC0R2wjZ8s

tremendoid see if u are feeling this

ha xp

totally! slowness totally appropriate. she's in love with bending the note at the end of lines, she finally found a place for it (like a jeopardy contestant who says some wrong shit three times until its the right answer)

i usually don't judge so quick but i cant deal with the pacing atm. certain artist you just want to push em or shake them like a baby (like you shouldnt shake a baby) chelonis jones hits me like that on some songs. shelter though..

The music reminds me of Breathless, or 17 Seconds era Cure. You can hear a bit of dubstep in there but it's kind of 'under' the songs. A bit 4AD too, maybe Dead can Dance or something. The man's voice gets very annoying and the girl has a tendency to try and bend the note in the last word of every line she sings.

I can see the YMG thing too, in the space the songs have, what's left out, but they don't atcually 'sound' like them.

quick note: it's possible for people to be in bands, and make music, without being encyclopedia-brained muso types; i know most of the people i know who are in actual regularly playing bands aren't the people who also know a shit-ton about music. - have actually been asked of a ymg cd i was playing "hey, isn't this a hole cover?"

i think maybe musos want the mental processes of making music to be identical to those of knowing about music

& i don't think this band is a point you'd arrive at starting from the young marble giants

I think, actually, being an encyclopaedia-brained muso type can actually be harmful to being a music-making person. Like, you can never do anything new without thinking "argh, that's not new, that's a b-side of some obscure indie band from the 80s!" which can be kind of crippling. I imagine that not having this weight of history hanging over you can be very freeing.

Dude, THIS is name-dropping. So far in the thread this band reminded of:

Aaliyah
Cocorosie
Rhianna
The Cure
Missy Elliott
The Chromatics
Mariah Carey
The Pixies
Young Marble Giants
Morcheeba
Chris Isaak
Whitest Boy Alive
Cassie
Shriekback
Everything But the Girl
Tricky
Jesus and Mary Chain
Massive Attack
Felt
M. Ward
LOW
The Birthday Party
Red Right Hand
Moderat
Breathless

...you left out Dead Can Dance.

see? It was not easy.

getting big Vengaboys vibes from this myself

^ didn't want to be the first person to say this. also, rednex

this thread is just a pale rip off of ____

Their cover of 'Boom-Shack-A-Lack' really brings out elements I'd never really noticed in the original.

can we add Chairlift to that list pls?

Red Right Hand is a Nick Cave song, it was part of me saying I thought they sounded a bit like the birthday party but then saying that it was only because the sound was so crap where I saw them that they sounded completely different.

I think the funny thing here is that this band are so minimal that it's VERY easy to project lots of soundalikes or thinkalikes on them as influences.

If I wrote for The Guardian I'd write some crap like 'this record is the history of pop music from 1981 to these days'.

and then I would rule the world.

what is funny is how easily this is sitting on my ipod with clubroot, distance and that fourtet/burial, not suggesting that it sounds anything like them, just that the transition doesn't jar.

i was serious when i said shiny toy guns btw. probably rong but serious, haven't heard stg in at least a year

really liking "crystalised" so far and the album reminds me a bit of the awesome D Lissvik album from last year. I still play that one all the time.

u forgot Tim F's Insides meets Colder comparison. which is true tbh now that ive listened to this more. esp. 'heart skipped a beat'. im loving this now. def. up in my top 5 of the year.

Ha if the Insides album came out now people would probably believe it was dubstep influenced. Given dubstep in the broad sense means atmospherics + bass + torpid tempos any such "influence" can be real and still meaningless. Any well-produced UK post-post-punk can make the same claim.

The R&B references strike me as kinda misleading unless you're the kind of person who thinks Aaliyah's blankness is good because it makes her sound like an indie singer. To flip it the other way round and put it more sympathetically, I get the sense that what The XX like about R&B is stuff they also like in music closer to their own style, and then try to emphasise it - reserve, brittle perfection, emphasis on phrasing etc. So the real meaning of "woah these guys like dubstep and R&B" may be "therefore they probably also like and make the kind of indie that we who like R&B and dubstep can get with."

All that said I think The XX would do a totally life-changing cover version of Missy's "Hot Boys".

In fact it shocks me that no-one has tried that trick yet.

(if any indie group wants to hire me as a svengali this is my real email address)

All that said I think The XX would do a totally life-changing cover version of Missy's "Hot Boys".

ha, oh shit, yes.

unless you're the kind of person who thinks Aaliyah's blankness is good because it makes her sound like an indie singer.

Excuse me while I take a hammer to my cranium.

the bit on islands where he goes "that bridge is on fi-er" is so great, each line of that voice has this little gap that makes the following symbol sound like the extension of a yawn.

*verse, not voice

All that said I think The XX would do a totally life-changing cover version of Missy's "Hot Boys".

In fact it shocks me that no-one has tried that trick yet.

Actually Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and Dear Nora did that a couple of years back...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAaFrln3wGU

...WHY DID I STOP LISTENING TO CASIOTONE TWO ALBUMS AGO >:(

That's fucking awesome.

See, you miss out on these things if you're not careful. :-D

This album is great, it sounds like the followup to Stars' "Nightsongs" which Stars are clearly never going to make, having been corrupted by Broken Social Scene. Except Nightsongs is all Smithy while this album is all Curey.

having been corrupted by Broken Social Scene

that's crazy talk, and if Teh XX ever write a song fit to touch the hem of Stars' garments I will take back what I said miles upthread. But it'll never happen.

Broken Social Scene has poisoned a lot of good individual artists, FACT.

Still think this album is mostly a dud, though. Except for "Crystalised," which I'll rep for until the end of time.

What I mean is that BSS may have poisoned others, but their necrotic grip has never had done anything bad to Stars who are the shining jewel of the whole A&C stable by a country mile.

I'm still not convinced by these guys, but I'm hoping one day it'll click and they'll become my favourite band ever.

I'm just saying Stars have yet to revisit the icy coolness of Nightsongs, which the XX have so effortlessly tapped into on their debut album. And I can't help thinking it has to do with exposure to beards.

They're on Jools Holland tonight for anyone with BBC.

Thanks!

"their TV debut"

She looks like Fat Bob, no?

I really like that "You've Got The Love" cover/remix they've done for Fat Machine.

It helps that she doesn't really appear on it.

Way late to the party, but this just came out in the States. Really, really fucking good.

This was out in Boston at the beginning of September!

Hmmmm, I don't know. It still is a $30 import on Amazon and most of the stores I asked at told me an October 20th date, but it happened to pop up in Best Buy of all places last week.

Nevermind, scratch that part about Amazon, I can't read this morning.

Anyway, I'm really really loving this.