The xx don’t come at you with all guns blazing. They don’t shout. They don’t even play their instruments particularly loud. Instead, they kiss and caress, lulling you into an amorously comatose state. You could almost say they put you in the mood for loving. But the unrequited kind where you love, lose and thanklessly long. The xx even have the good grace to provide the disheartened dialogue for it all.
From the aptly titled ‘Intro’ – a fleeting two minutes of gentle guitar reverb and slight monasteric vocal – ‘xx’ is an album that beguiles. Romy Madeley Croft and Oliver Sim’s twin vocal wisps around a lovingly created, albeit minimal, deadspace of downbeat melody, lonely guitar plucks and lingering piano, allowing the duo’s voices to rest and linger, echoing around deliciously sultry expanses. It’s best showcased on the porcelain wail of ‘Crystalised’ – Romy and Oliver’s call and response a deep, dark and coolly restrained triumph. And it’s this Romeo and Juliet dynamic (they’re actually best friends) melded with the trembling resonance of a Donnie Darko soundtrack that gives The xx a shivering presence.
You can’t but help feel that something’s impending when ‘Fantasy’ slides into eerie, tremulous life, or when ‘Infinity’, driven by Oliver’s deadpan mumble and ‘Killing Moon’ guitar work, seemingly builds to a sinister crescendo. But for every instance of gorgeous doom-mongering, there lays the raw, untainted emotion of ‘Shelter’ or the stirring naked, confession of ‘Night Time’ underscoring the band’s delicate ear for balancing bleak melody and lines wrought with care and desire; Romy desperately beseeching ‘Can I make it better with the lights still on?’
As the duo play call and response on the passionate ‘Infinity’, imploring each other to ‘Give it up’ met with ‘ I can’t give it up’, there comes a familiar point where you lose yourself to near-forgotten dewy-eyed whispers with teenage sweethearts. Those times when you promised each other the world, and fully intended on delivering – the song, and indeed those promises, fading out to ambiguity.
And for every affected, unhurried note, every cherished word, for every latent sigh, The xx entreat you to run to your nearest and dearest and promise them that everything will be ok.