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The XX -
XX
Music
Label: Xl
Recordings
Reviewer: Reef Younis
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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?’
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Kill It Kid - Kill It Kid
Music
Label: One
Little Indian
Reviewer: A. Sargeant
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Reinforced with strings, some harmonica and some screaming
slide-guitar, singers Chris Turpin and Stephanie Ward
grapple with tonsil-tearing tunes as furious as bagful
of bees and as big as a double-decker bus. It’s like
a blast of air from a cattle-gun. When bands usually
sing about a river bursting its banks, they don’t usually
evoke the wild, kinetic fury of such an event. Fair
enough, there wasn’t the sound of Gene Kelly splashing
around in puddles when Mint Royale served us ‘Singin’
In The Rain’, but you get the gist. When the subject
matter is big, so is the sound and when it’s tender
– as it is on the gorgeous and petitioning, ‘Send Me
An Angel Down’, the sound could quite feasibly have
been torn from the 'shattered hallelujahs' of a Sunday
hymn-sheet. It’s gospel meets Gomez, Anthony meets the
Johnsons, rhythm meets the blues and as shamlessly smoky
as a pubful of sixties beatniks. Sure it sounds a bit
ingenuous arriving from the lungs of a couple of 21
year-old students from Bath and not some grizzled oldtimer
from the Mississippi Delta, but when the dirty water
tastes this sweet: who gives f*ck that it came out of
a tap in Somerset?
The album was mixed and recorded by Ryan Hadlock (The
Strokes, The Gossip) in Seattle, the same studio used
by the Fleet Foxes to lay down their debut. ’Kill It
Kid’ is out October 5th.
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