Review of The xx's 'Coexist' and a few entirely relevant digressions

Now, I’m relatively certain I’m not the only person who reviews music on a fairly regular basis. I’m also relatively certain I’m not the only person who reviews music on a fairly regular basis who reviews music even when he/she doesn’t have to. To help illustrate this, I’ve a little anecdote: Channel 4 have just started a recent series called 999: What’s Your Emergency? (bear with me on this) which, unsurprisingly, is all about 999 calls. In a recent episode, a police officer man confesses how, so long has he had his job, he is simply incapable of ‘switching off’ as if it were – this is what it’s like for us music reviewers, and I think you’ll agree who’s job in hand is more important, a thank you very much. The reason I bother with this seemingly irrelevant anecdote is because I didn’t go into listening to The xx’s Coexist hoping to review it and yet here I am? Those who have my Twitter feed as their homepage (@wgsa_musicblog, highly recommended) would have spotted I listened to Coexist for the first time whilst on a walk on an appropriately gloomy afternoon (you can count the number of colours The xx like to feature in their fashion sense on one finger and that’s only, of course, if you consider black a colour) – I was meant to be listening to this big new release only for pleasure and yet I found myself making notes on my phone whilst plodding (walking would suggest I’m far too happy) along? After some quite rigorous note taking on my phone (‘rigorous’ because I for one can admit a man standing dead still in the middle of the countryside texting looks a little suspicious – anyone for dogging?) and coming to the end of the LP, I noticed two things: 1) I had quite a few notes and 2) I had just been on an emotional rollercoaster (here’s where the whole ‘album review’ part comes in). Get your tissues ready, because this review has more up and down than not only your typical everyday Hollyoaks episode, but also a Hollyoaks Later episode.

My listening experience starts off so well with lead single, Angels (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nW5AF0m9Zw). Ah, what bliss it is to hear a band who are quite content to take their time and not rush (I really could do a whole blog post about how much it annoys me that, should you turn on the radio – I’m talking Radio 1/Capital FM etc. – there is a 99.9% chance there’ll be some happening rapper/Flo Rida doing his ‘thang’ over a nerve breaking as it is repetitive generic electronic beat, but I’m not going to as it would amount to a rant far more than it would a structured blog post, and I’ve always tried ever so hard not to be that guy). I had a bit of a moment to myself a couple weeks back where Greg James played Angels in between two songs where a ‘happening rapper/Flo Rida did his ‘thang’ over a nerve breaking as it is repetitive generic electronic beat’ that he’s inclined to play, and I can confidently say that to describe those 2 minutes and 53 seconds The xx provided as beautiful is a massive understatement. When it comes to The xx, for me it is not so much about what their music sounds like, rather it is what their music represents – it’s important to me as it is a break away from the norm in that a whole song by The xx is unlikely to reach the amount of decibels Flo Rida is in his first three seconds. But what means the most to me is that, despite pretty much everything about The xx being popular culture’s worst nightmare (try to imagine Nicki Minaj in Jamie xx’s dress sense? Exactly.), they are still very much a part of popular culture; take the anecdote I told a couple sentences back, for example – The xx was on Radio 1! Could I be drastic enough to say that such occurrences still give me hope about pop music as we know it today? Yes, I think I could.

Getting my way through the album, I feel a bit of a theory that would (hopefully) help to illustrate what Coexist is all about coming on. Sure there’ll be a few anomalies along the way, but I do feel the relevant lead singles of both the band’s self-titled debut and their follow-up in question are fairly representative of each album as a whole. For their Mercury Prize-winning xx, they started proceedings with Crystalised and, as aforementioned, for their most probably Mercury Prize-nominated Coexist (nominations are being announced later today) they first marketed it with Angels – Crystalised is bold and exciting (heck, it almost even has a drum roll in it!) whilst Angels is more relaxed and content to allow the music do the work (sounds a little harsh, but I’m inclined to say that once you’ve heard the first 30 seconds you’ve heard the whole song). The unfortunate thing about is that I can apply this rather damning bracketed opinion to the whole album. It was always going to be interesting where The xx were going to go with new material; such is the uniqueness of their sound they were somehow rather restricted as to which direction they could go (they were hardly going to turn to gangster rap, were they?). Having had a good few listens of Coexist now, it appears that the drastic new direction The xx have gone in to keep things fresh and exciting is quiet. ‘Quiet?’, I hear you ask. Yes, ‘quiet’. ‘But they were already quiet?’ I hear you carry on, and quite rightly so, and it is exactly here where I feel the problem with Coexist lies. xx was a very quiet record (I’m sure I’m not alone in regarding The xx as a ‘headphone band’, meaning you can only really hear, let alone appreciate, what is going on whilst listening to them through headphones – should there be such background noise as the flapping of a butterfly wing, you simply won’t be able to appreciate the gentle humming bass line in the background that makes all the difference) – given that I’ve proposed the new direction in which The xx have gone with Coexist, one can appreciate just how ‘nothing’ the latter is. It is once I got towards the latter half of the LP that it started to dawn on me that there’s only so much that one can do with ‘nothing’, even for the band who must be considered the purveyors of such a genre. I could not have really gone from one extreme to the next any more! As was reflected in this review, at the start of the album I might as well have been proclaiming The xx and their new album to be The Saviour, a modern day Jesus who’ll save us from hearing the same electronic drum beat night and day (Friday and Saturday nights I can understand, but is there anyone who actually enjoys being subjected to the likes of Will.I.Am before midday?), and yet coming towards the latter stages I’m thinking The xx – or Coexist, at least – are just as bad as those I was previously blaming for the decline of humanity. Sure there are some differences – The xx can produce music, Will.I.Am cannot, for example – but what worries/annoys me the most about popular music is the one-dimensionality of it all. I hate to do this, but it must be asked: why does The xx doing the same thing over and over again make them any better than, say, David Guetta doing the same thing over and over again? And then answer is: it doesn’t. Of course I wasn’t looking for anything too drastic from Coexist (I’m a big fan of their first and I can appreciate that neither ‘drastic’, nor ‘change’, is going to be vocabulary that features in the day-to-day lives of The xx all that much), but I was at least expecting a few, what can only be described as, ‘magic xx moments’ – the moments where the song finally comes to its climax and everything starts to make sense; the moments which put a sly smile on your face where everything just clicks; the moments which make you think ‘Thank God for The xx’. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out their first album – it’s full of these ‘magic xx moments’. If you’re lazy and want your hit straight away, just check out the first song of their first album, unsurprisingly called Intro (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ktYpaGVUe0 – great fan made video to boot) – it’s pretty much a 2 minute long ‘magic xx moment’. Nothing too ‘try hard’ about it, nor anything particularly loud – when deconstructed, it merely adds up to a simple riff, a simple bass line, a simple drum beat and some simple vocals. This isn’t to say all of these elements needed to be bonded together to compile a ‘magic xx moment’, it’s to say a lot isn’t needed. And yet despite this, as try as I might to find one, a ‘magic xx moment’ never really arrives on Coexist? Sure Angels is pleasant, and things seem to come together nicely on Swept Away (around the 1m30s mark), but other than that the album never really seems to get going, it all feels that The xx are quite content – too content – to wallow around in its murkiness and mystery. Then again, perhaps it’s harsh for me to compare their follow-up to their debut? When a debut is as successful as xx, the band in question is somehow, and admittedly rather unfairly, thrown into a lose-lose situation: make a follow-up different to their first and people will complain it’s lost the magic of the first; make a follow-up similar to the first and people will complain the magic they displayed on the first is all they’ve got (after all, there ain’t the phrase ‘the difficult second album’ for nothing)! Given that I haven’t strayed too far off the mentality of ‘old album = good, new album = bad’, for much of this review/discussion, I’d be the first to admit that I probably am clinging on to The xx of old and thus consequently it most definitely was a bad idea to even consider comparing the two albums. But no matter how many albums deep a band are into their career, it’s always tricky to comment on an outfit as successful and well received as The xx: whilst the little boy inside of me (figurative, not literal) tells me I should get sucked up into the hype just like everybody else (reviews I’ve read and the ever faithful Wikipedia indicate that people seem to like Coexist), the hipster inside of me (probably a bit more literal) urges me to believe that the hype surrounding The xx and Coexist is just that – hype. Given that it would be far too hipster/egocentric of me to say that all those who consider Coexist a triumph are wrong (I actually just laughed at such a angst ridden suggestion), the possibility that perhaps The xx simply aren’t for me any longer must be considered. After all, as made clear in the latter half of this review I personally see a distinct gap in terms of quality between their debut and follow-up, and yet Wikipedia tells me that critics are lapping Coexist up just as they did xx. Whilst it is the sparseness of this album that irks me so, Puja Patel of Spin magazine, for example, says, in fact, it is exactly this that transforms the music ‘into something alive and dynamic’? Were The xx to no longer be to my taste, I’d understand that I wouldn’t be in a position to comment (I denied myself the chance to be in The Fly magazine during my time there due to this belief – I was asked to review The Chapman Family’s Cruel Britannia EP (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ISud-0Ynf4&feature=plcp) but as it wasn’t my kind of thing I elected, perhaps wrongly, to put morality in front of my career and passed on the opportunity), but given that a couple weeks back I was ranting and raving about Youth Lagoon’s The Year of Hibernation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC0UtEH2Su0), which isn’t so far off The xx in terms of musical style, I feel that my love for melancholic timidity hasn’t passed me quite yet and I am thus in a position to not only have an opinion about The xx’s Coexist, but to also express it as strongly as I have here. So, in conclusion, I’m (rather surprisingly) going to use aforementioned pro-Coexist critic Puja Patel’s words to finally establish how I feel: Mr. Patel says that the ‘stylised sparseness’ transforms the music ‘into something alive and dynamic instead of merely sleepy.’ I couldn’t disagree more.