Track of the Moment: Angels by The xx

 

I love to steal away Track of the Moments from Steve, and with today’s post on The xx, I’ve done just that. Actually, I don’t know if Steve likes The xx, but knowing his tastes, I’d be surprised if he didn’t. If that’s not a quote that should go on the front of the album, I don’t know what is.

The xx is a British band formed in the prestigious Elliott School. No, it’s the not the college of music our Elliott founded (that doesn’t exist yet silly), but rather the one in England that’s produced some great talents like Burial, Pierce Brosnan (the actor, not that there's a band named after him), and Four Tet (who, by the way, looks like a meth addict who hasn’t slept for 3 days in his Wikipedia picture). The xx claims that the school didn’t have much influence over them, but whatever, they did go there. Shut up.

The xx is ambient pop done right. All of their good songs are the perfect definition of restrained music. Usually I’d throw on, say Major Lazer’s “Get Free (ft. Amber Coffman)” or Usher’s “Climax” to show what I meant by restraint (strangely, Diplo produced Climax, and is the main man of Major Lazer, who isn’t normally known for his restraint). But every song just has so much energy bubbling below the surface, so much tension in the instrumentation that builds up and tries to break through, but can’t ever get there. So it sits there, being quiet and ambient, waiting for its chance to crash down on your ears in a wall of sound. Even the songs that do let the beast out of the cage and allow for some fantastic crescendos and rises and falls, like “Missing” just feel so right, so good.

Who thought "Hey, let's parody The Smiths so we can show how deep and moody we are, but do it ironically."

The xx go for this pillow talk, dream pop sound. Lots of reverb on the guitars, ethereal synths, and quiet instrumentation, with whispered and murmured vocals on top of them. While I’m a big lyrics guy, I can also sit back and just listen to the sound of someone’s voice, which is almost mandatory here, with the murmurs and relatively weak lyrics here. Not to say it's a bad thing; I personally enjoy it. But it’s one of those sounds that you either love or hate, get or don’t get, enjoy or don’t enjoy. I personally love them, and if you check out “Angels” down below, you’ll see why. It’s just so damn good.

If you want some more pillow talk, hit up any of the writers on our Facebook page. Or you can go there for music and stuff.

Track of the Moment: Bill Gates/Never Leave by XXYYXX

If you follow what I write (which is a whole bunch of people, or at least that’s what I tell myself to make me feel better), then you know I’m a huge fan of open beats and lots of lows/bass. However, I’m generally not a fan of chopped and screwed songs, and that’s where XXYYXX doesn’t sound like he would appeal to me. However, there are a few artists who are good at it; The Weeknd on the track “Initiation”, Pogo (who will get his own TotM soon enough), and XXYYXX.

For those that don’t know (which I assume is most of you, if you haven’t already Googled “Chopped and Screwed”), is when the DJ takes a vocal track and divides it up into small pieces so that it’s mostly just fairly unintelligible syllables, although the bits can be long enough to include a word or 2. Once the DJ has his “chopped” vocal samples, he then “screws” them by playing with the pitch and length of each sample. While it may sound like it would hectic, a good artist can do some amazing things with it, and use it the same way someone would use a guitar or synth. Which XXYYXX does better than most of what I’ve heard.

He’s currently got 2 full albums and an EP out, with XXYYXX (that’s his 2^nd album) and Mystify (that’s the EP) being the good ones of the trio. XXYYXX features more of what I like; very calm, open beats with minimal sounds, relying on extended chopped vocals and the occasional synthesized sound. It’s rather ambient, but it’s the good ambient – the kind that you put on in the background, but still find yourself splitting your attention.

However, Mystify is a crossbreed of XXYYXX and Flying Lotus’s Cosmogramma, which, if you remember, was one of my top 42 albums. While it does have a few chopped and screwed vocal elements to it, it mostly stays in the soft-jazzy realm with multiple layers (but nothing that approaches FL’s controlled chaos), crackly beats, quiet and omnipresent low-frequency synths, and a variety of MIDI beeps and boops (which sometimes get replaced by a cool synth). It’s a bit more fun than the album up there, but still XXYYXX’s own ambient sound.

Check him out on Band Camp. His stuff is only a $1 there, so it’s a pretty low-risk investment. You can also stream all of his stuff off of Band Camp, so you can try before you buy. But to save you that extra step that we all know you won’t take, here’s a little something off of Mystify, and a solid track from XXYYXX.