The XX - Coexist

When I heard that a new XX album was released, I immediately went and put away everything that would remind me of my exes while I prepared to listen to it.  The often haunting and arresting simplicity of their début self titled album was remarkable.  The group has a great power to use their emptiness for raw emotional impact, exchanging complex songs for your own complex emotional response to it.  Songs like "Heart Skipped a Beat" and "Islands" from their first album definitely left me breathless, and if you have not listened to them, I suggest you do it now.

In their new album, Coexist, The XX still chase the same emotionally drained emptiness that their first album did, but it is altogether slower and although the songs have a more complete feel to them, I found that this took away from their emotional impact.  In this record, they don't put silence and empty space to work in nearly as affectively as they did before.  They do attempt to do this on "Tides" and "Our Song," but without engaging lyrical content, these two both come off as flat and uninteresting.

One thing that I noticed as soon as the opener "Angels" started playing is a change in percussion style from their last album.  The drum rolls on this track and cymbal splashes on "Chained" give a new organic life to these songs which was previously alien to The XX, and it is a fantastic development.  Jamie XX has also stated that club music had a strong influence on this record, which you can hear in songs like "Reunion," "Sunset," and "Chained," but the sleepy nocturnal feel that the xx produces does not allow them to be compared to any real club music.  That is not a problem for me because I would never expect an XX record to make me want to do anything but cry myself to sleep.  As a side note though I do see some good club remix possibilities for songs like "Chained" and "Try," the Hype Machine and Youtube confirm this suspicion.

Many of the songs sound more developed than on their first album, but their constituent elements don't always feel like they mesh very organically.  I noticed this the most with the very dark sounding guitar intro to "Try" (couldn't find a working link) which, although it sounded great on its own, had a very different tone than the rest of the song.  I also wish that steel drum on the next song "Reunion" were more of a centre piece because Jamie XX has shown how pretty he can make it sound in his solo work on the song "Far Nearer."

In general, I was not particularly thrilled with this album.  While I liked the improvement in percussion, many of these songs seemed awkwardly put together and dull.  It didn't have nearly the same arresting impact for me as their first album.  The real pitfall of making such skeletal music as the XX does is that if the few elements you use are lacklustre, or if they don't coalesce very nicely, there is very little else to keep the music interesting.