The xx - I See You

Pitchfork 84

The xx’s self-titled debut remains one of the great sleeper hits of the last decade. No one—including, it’s fair to say, the xx themselves—expected that their murmuring blend of turn-of-the-millennium R&B and C86 indie pop would go on to sell a million copies and become hugely influential. But from the beginning, the London trio had a lot going for them. In Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, they had two songwriters conversant in the primal language of heartbreak and loss, whose vocals, though limited, conveyed anguish. Madley Croft’s guitar lines did a great deal with very little, the single notes carving deep feeling out of broad subjects. And producer and programmer Jamie xx, with his unerring ability to find rhythms that fit with emotions, made sure each tune got its perfect beat.

Coexist from 2012 was a decent re-statement of the debut’s animating ideas, but the prevailing story of the xx in the years since that debut has been the rise of Jamie xx. The most exciting music coming out of their camp—from one-off singles like “Far Nearer” and “All Under One Roof Raving” to his 2015 breakthrough In Colour—belonged to him. The xx was all about working within limitations, with a prescribed set of sounds and themes; Jamie xx’s solo music was built around samples, and was, accordingly, wide open, bound only by his adventurous ear. I See You, the third album by the xx, sounds like an attempt to incorporate everyone’s talents into a new version of their sound, one true to their roots but richer and more varied.

On their first two albums, the xx limited their arrangements so that the songs could be performed live. But here, Jamie xx’s samples form the backbone of several songs, allowing them to move into territory that would be impossible with a guitar/bass/programmed-percussion set up. An early single, “On Hold,” even cops a mangled hook from a Hall and Oates song. It’s a quintessential Jamie xx sample, easily recognizable the moment you hear it but taking a moment to place, allowing your memory to fill in the blanks as the song moves and changes around it. Heard on its own late last year, “On Hold” sounded slightly forced, but it makes perfect sense as a brighter, poppier part of a record that takes the essential xx subject of uncertain love to near-concept album status.

As much as the expansive production helps move things forward, this is in many ways Madley Croft and Sim’s album. Both have grown as vocalists. Neither has tremendous range or depth, but they’re clever and resourceful singers, able to shape meaning through subtle inflections and shifts in phrasing. Sim’s approach is more face-to-face and straightforward—he seems like he’s holding up his end of a conversation—while Madley Croft seems like she’s talking to a mirror, trying to steel herself to share her feelings with the world. The delivery of every line is considered, as the pair tug at the edges of lines to get the expression just right. “I just don’t re-mem-ber,” Sim sings, drawing out the final syllable in “Say Something Loving,” imparting an additional touch of longing without overreaching; “Here come my insecurities/I almost expect you to leave,” Madley Croft sings in the same song, nearly summing up the record’s lyrical concerns in a single line.

The defining characteristics of these voices are helplessness, fear, and hurt; the xx sound quite far from the indie pop of their debut stylistically, but they retain their connection to that world because they still traffic in shy introspection and vulnerability. For the narrators of these songs, there’s a constant war between how the world sees them and how they feel inside, and self-love isn’t part of the equation. On “Performance,” Madley Croft sings about keeping up appearances, giving the illusion that everything is OK when she’s dying inside. “Brave for You” is a tribute to her deceased parents, but it could be about anyone who believes in you more than you believe in yourself. All the existential wrestling—interior vs. exterior, the promises and betrayals—happens in the closest of spaces; “My name on your lips/Your air in my lungs/Drowned in oxygen,” sings Madley Croft on “Lips,” sketching out just how close and intimate this world is.

“Performance” and “Brave for You” both feel like classic xx songs—they are naked and spare, with hints of strings and Madley Croft’s guitar and a whole lot of silence. About a third of the album works with stripped-down, open arrangements like this, while others make judicious use of samples and layers of synths and sequencers. “Dangerous” opens the album with a startling blast of a horns that returns on the chorus as a counterpoint melody. “A Violent Noise” has a winding and surging cluster of arpeggiating notes that explode at all the right moments—something of a Jamie xx trademark—and the production brilliantly traces the emotional arc of the song.

As an album, I See You has the eerily seamless wholeness of the self-titled debut, a smooth and polished object with no visible edges. If it came apart, you would almost certainly never be able to put it back together again. As such, each individual song seems most realized in the context of the album, as it builds on or tweaks or develops what came before and hints at something to come, and the closing “Test Me” ties it altogether. The song’s production is breathtaking, one of Jamie xx’s masterpieces, all Eno-like suggestion, and the words are both simple and move the record’s narrative forward. “Test me,” both Madley Croft and Sim sing, “see if I break,” suggesting an unspoken strength that might have been there all along.

Drowned In Sound 80

While this would make it seem like The xx's success a fluke, let's make no mistake here. The trio's self-titled record is still one of the best UK debut records ever released and this combined with their timing and humble nature made them the global megastars they became. While the band almost certainly didn't personally have world-conquering ambitions, their music suggested otherwise - a love letter in triumphalism.

However, any band with that amount of hope and expectation weighed on them need nerves of steel to keep it together, and in the time since, The xx have struggled to survive. The glacial follow-up, 2012's Coexist was a disappointment and as they recently pointed out in a Pitchfork interview (http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/9997-ill-be-your-mirror-how-the-xx-found-themselvesand-their-vibrant-new-soundin-each-other/), were themselves bordering on self-parody due to the pressure. Then, the band's silent background beatmaker, Jamie (XX) Smith, after a promising collaboration with the late, great Gil-Scott Heron, released one of the most popular and successful records of this decade In Colour. It was a perfect title for an artist largely dealing with monochrome until this point - a vibrant album which almost suggested, despite band members Romy Madly Croft and Oliver Sim's vocal contributions, that Jamie XX was going to supersede his parent band.

So it was a surprise when The xx announced their third album I See You for early 2017 at a time where, nearly, they had been forgotten. Even more of a surprise, for anyone who had heard The xx's music before (which let's face it, at this point is nearly everyone with ears) is that the band appeared to be taking on Jamie's solo successes with a sound far more on-trend with current pop music if advance singles 'On Hold' and 'Say Something Loving' were anything to go by. Given Romy and Oliver Sim's small contributions to the Jamie XX solo album, was this third XX album going to be more Jamie than ever before?

Well, thankfully, the answer is no. Despite being clearly more directed by Jamie's production and sampling this time and less reliant on guitars, I See You is still very much an xx album. In fact, it is clearly the most focused they have sounded as an act since all the way back in 2009 when they were first introducing themselves. The triumphalism is back, and this time it not necessarily at odds with the music it exists over. Take opener 'Dangerous', a statement song if ever we have heard one, it takes the brass sampling now associated with Jamie XX, but adds a brilliant, thumping bassline from Sim and a vocal performance from both him and Romy who exclaim "They say we are dangerous but I don't care," exploring the marriage between the excitement of a fulfilling relationship with performing music in a band.

For perhaps the first time, Sim and Romy sound comfortable in their dual 'frontpeople' roles, bringing a swagger and performance to their music which in its place used to be intimacy and charming timidness. Meanwhile, Smith provides an excellent backdrop to colour in the background behind the two vocalists. Aforementioned 'Say Something Loving' equally, exhibits this confidence as a band singing about familiar themes but presenting them in an entirely different way. Towards the end of the album, this manifests as pure pop music. Already seen on first single 'On Hold', but perhaps even more so 'I Dare You' which has the potential to be the year's big summer festival sing-a-long.

This said, it's not all happy-go-lucky - it is an xx album after all. The core of the record is a much darker affair with Romy's breathtaking 'Performance' and 'Brave For You' which equate her role as a musician and artist with her personal relationships to her partner and in the latter, her lost family members. It is here that outside influences begin to appear with the former reminding one of Savages' incredible track 'Adore' from last year, while the latter could easily be mistaken for a Beach House song. In-between those, Sim's 'Replica', a track dealing with his problems with drink and substance abuse, leans even more heavily into the band's already prevalent obsession with The Cure.

Despite these transparent influences, however, The xx still manage to successfully make these songs their own, even if there is an overbearing feeling with the songs' themes that we have been here before. Not all of it works, either. 'Lips' and 'A Violent Noise' are both the most Jamie XX production heavy, and both suffer for their exclusion of The xx's strongest traits as a band, bordering almost on "EDM" territory. Ultimately, though, this is a more than solid album from a band who it was once assumed had given up. While nothing will compare to the band's exceedingly unattainable debut, it is refreshing to see the band learn from their mistakes on Coexist and create something new and intriguing, but still ultimately them. While some of the band's critics can still point to the underdeveloped lyrical or vocal performances, that was never really the point in The xx who were so singular an act to start with. And besides, considering album closer 'Test Me' which summarises the band's personal and group struggles, there is no denying their physical prowess on record.

The Guardian 80

(Warp)
The xx have come out of their shell for their least insular album yet – but don’t expect Justin Bieber

Pregnant with potential meanings, the title of the xx’s immersive third album gradually reveals itself over the course of 10 new songs. It is not accusative – “I see you, stealing that guitar sound” – but more in keeping with the ongoing themes of this minimal, intimate band; more consolatory. “I see you”, this album says, “as you are.”

Prefaced by a series of more outgoing tracks, I See You has been touted as the xx’s least insular album thus far. If Jamie Smith’s solo outing of 2015, In Colour, constituted a successful experiment with shades beyond the minimal monochrome that originally defined the band, then I See You finds them a little gaudier of palette. Using samples for the first time, they have tweaked their sound in myriad ways, while still retaining the sense of proximity within spaciousness for which they are famous. You could say it was more commercial, if the mainstream hadn’t been biting the xx’s style relentlessly. (“Justin Bieber is doing tropical house,” noted Smith in a recent interview.)

The Guardian 80

Their last album carried the sense of a band unsure where to go after the success of their debut, but now they seem to have cracked that problem

It was one of 2016’s weirder musical phenomena: the sensation that huge chunks of the singles chart sounded oddly but irrefutably like the xx’s 2009 debut album. It was strange, not least because the xx’s debut album was so unassuming: packed with hushed, inward-looking songs, it sounded like music that was trying to avoid catching your eye, as if it was locked in an intense, personal conversation and didn’t want to be disturbed. You might have expected it to garner critical acclaim, to win the Mercury prize, to inspire a raft of other black-clad indie bands, all of which it did. But the notion of it exerting an influence on the kind of unashamed pop artists that tweenagers feel impelled to scream along to seemed no more likely than the notoriously reticent members of the xx turning up on Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and pranking unsuspecting members of the public. And yet, seven years on, the album’s fingerprints are also all over the list of 2016’s best-selling singles: you can hear its muted, echoing guitars on everything from the Chainsmokers’ Don’t Let Me Down to Shawn Mendes’ Stitches to Zara Larsson’s Lush Life. “Their ‘hauntingness’ gets referenced in at least every other [writing] session,” noted Ryan Tedder, songwriter by appointment to Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Beyoncé and Adele, among umpteen others.

But if the xx’s debut album cast an unexpected shadow over manufactured pop, it also cast a shadow over the trio themselves: 2012’s Coexist had its moments, but it was audibly the sound of a band who had emerged with a sound, mood and image fully formed, now trying to work out how to move on and develop, and settling for doing more of the same, only quieter. But somewhere in the five years between Coexist and its successor, they appear to have cracked the problem. Perhaps they worked out that if your singers have voices as distinctive as Romy Madley-Croft and Oliver Sim – for two people with a remarkably understated and unshowy vocal style by modern standards, they’re immediately recognisable – it allows you to shift and change your sound without losing your identity. But from the opening moment of its opening track, Dangerous – a blast of dancehallesque synthesised horns over a beat that marries the steady bass thud of house to the skipping snares of two-step garage – I See You pulls off the feat of managing to sound both exactly like the xx and unlike anything they have done before.