The xx – XX (CD)
Product Details
Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim, and Jamie Smith met as teenagers at Elliott School in South London, and the intimacy of that origin story is inseparable from what you hear on this debut. Recorded on a shoestring while the three were barely out of school, XX arrived in 2009 and won the Mercury Prize, but its real achievement was quieter: it made space itself feel like an instrument.
The xx unique make-up is an inadvertent second nature marriage of 2009's urban/guitar tribes, in one corner fluttering new wave indebted reverberation, in the other, plumes of post-dubstep sub-bass and figuratively, their defining core of rich R&B vocal textures. The enveloping vocal partnership of Romy and Oliver is one that would've dropped-jaws in any decade this century, and set amidst a shivering soundscape of beats and plucks, their bedroom-reared concrete-soul is being justly heralded as the UK's most original and treasured alt. Pop artifact of late.
Tracklist
UPC: 634904045029
Label: XL Recordings
Release Date: 10.6.09
Format: CD