From the xx, Weyes Blood and Neil Young
In their outstanding third album, the xx show they can even have some fun.
The genius of pop composition is found within the gaps and lulls. It’s too easy to putty up any cracks with a wall of sound or drape the space with blankets of synths and gutsy guitars.
The risk of leaving the holes showing is that your minimalism is mistaken for downbeat introspection, but if handled expertly, they can display tension, restraint and a classy framework for sonic highlights.
The xx’s long-awaited third outing, I See You, has the trio still dealing in minimalism and space, but whereas 2009’s Mercury Prize-winning xx and 2012’s Coexist were built around removal and stripped-back indie R& B, the new album uses its cavities to create a busier, more expansive, more overtly outgoing sound.
From the first horn stabs and dubby beat-n-bass of opener Dangerous, this is a far poppier offering, with Jamie Smith’s production skills drifting in from his outstanding 2015 solo offering, In Colour, on clouds of distant raves and shimmering house parties.
Romy Madley Croft has never sounded so like Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn on Performance, Brave for You and
I Dare You, and Say Something Loving’s twisting duet threads over sparse, cavernous beats before rising into an
R &B finale.
Lips crashes as if threatening to break into a VIP pool party, and those hints of club and raveland carry into A Violent Noise, which sounds like a passing Doppler-effected dance party.
The trio deal in the restrained euphoria of Replica and Brave for You before the unashamed pop hit On Hold, with its Hall and Oates sample and hooky younghearts-lost-love chorus. This is the fullest sound on the album and shows that the xx can master more than minimalism – perhaps even live up to the “having fun” tag they promised in the long run-up to this outstanding offering.
I SEE YOU, the xx (Rhythmethod)
Natalie Mering’s vocals mix the clarity of Joan Baez with the rich warmth of Sandy Denny in Front Row Seat to Earth, her fourth outing as Weyes Blood. But her striking voice is a strange counterpoint to the otherworldly detachment of her lyrics.
This album may be a collection of beautiful love songs, but the composer’s alter ego seems puzzled to find herself scarred by brushes with humankind. With exquisite production (courtesy of Mering and ex-Deerhoof drummer Chris Cohen), these nine tracks whisper their 60s and
70s folk-rock influences while remaining strongly – and slightly anxiously – contemporary.
FRONT ROW SEAT TO EARTH, Weyes Blood (Southbound)
‘ Iwish somebody would share the news,” chants scratchy ol’ Neil Young. His grumpy new protest album, Peace Trail, draws Flint’s poisoned water, the Standing Rock oil pipeline protests, immigration and fake headlines into his traditional world view that we’re meandering towards a gloomy, inhuman final chapter. But the album feels more like the latest instalment of the Neil
Young Gazette, compared with the revelatory passion he showed in classic protest songs such as Ohio or more recent offerings such as The Monsanto Years.
Young mixes odd vocoder effects, a screeching harmonica and straight country-folk for a series of stories that show he’s still keeping watch on The Man, and he’s damned well gonna keep telling us about
him.