The xx crafts spare, haunting music on its sophomore effort.
It’s the elusive duality between confinement and solitude that makes The xx, a critically acclaimed indie-pop trio from London, such a special band. Its 2009 debut, xx, was a gorgeous evocation of subtle aching, the sound of three moody teenagers road-tripping by night through the desolate American landscape in a busted up ’86 Ford Taurus.
Its sophomore effort, Coexist, hardly diverts from the fundamental concepts of the first record. Everything is still buoyed by Jamie Smith’s minimalist, club-ready production, along with Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim’s call-and-response vocals that resemble sullen whispering more than emotive singing.
Where the album really succeeds is its textural flourishes. Coexist is a great deal more multidimensional than xx — the songs are less immediate and not as deeply layered. And while it may take some time to reveal itself to be better than just the sum of its sparse parts, there are many revelatory aspects to this definitively low-key record.
Take the opening track “Angels”, for instance. Except for Smith’s beats, which stutter step in short, effective bursts, the song is basically all Croft on guitar and vocals. On xx, it’d be difficult not to find this underwhelming. But on Coexist, the band has a subtle trick up its sleeve: space.
Listen closely to the stunning steel drums that pepper the melody on “Reunion:” The luminous swirl of sound is so ethereal and spacious it nearly threatens to float away into the next galaxy. The same goes for “Missing,” which features Sim’s most gut-wrenching vocal to date, showered in a ghostly hue of reverb. Balancing out such airiness, though, is Smith’s percussion, which pins down the weightless tune and molds it into a banger of a groove, as on “Tides.”
On occasion, the band meanders into full-throttled dance music, such as on the overly lengthy track “Swept Away.” At other times, it strays toward over-simplicity, such as on “Fiction,” which doesn’t carry an interesting enough melody to overcome its lack of substance.
But Coexist is a more mature step for an already precocious musical mainstay. They may be young, but Smith, Croft and Sim sound like seasoned veterans of internal suffering.
Luckily for us, they’re brilliant when it comes to verbalizing what makes them sad and putting it to beautiful music with which we can all identify.
essner@umdbk.com
