Album reviews

The XX -
XX
Music Label: Xl Recordings
Reviewer: Reef Younis

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?’

Kill It Kid - Kill It Kid
Music Label: One Little Indian
Reviewer: A. Sargeant

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.