The storyline behind The xx is so old it's barely worth telling. A group of four 20 year olds from London get together, record a stunning debut and are praised as the next in line to overtake the indie music throne. This version's stunning debut, xx, however, sets itself apart as not really falling into that same trajectory. It has no one distinctive influence or overbearing angst, but it manages to stretch the genre to a limit by rearing back and stripping it of nearly everything, showing encouraging amounts of confidence in the band's finer moments. It's actually surprising how young the members of The xx are considering how ballsy their debut LP is, whether those be in the form of confidence of hormones.
Xx is, in one word, vacant. The xx borrow from the fringes of Interpol, Hot Chip and Cut Copy, piecing together their sparse, off-handed tie-ins and hollow body fills that until now were mostly just afterthoughts. They live in the space between songs, the hole in the middle of the proverbial donut. The xx don't explore any new, uncharted territory, they just take a closer look at what's been disregarded for so long. That's not to say there's no structure or substance to their songs, though, rather that they make do with less, like a dolphin living its life confined to a 6-foot diameter kiddie pool. They don't carry the density to warrant a comparison to the spherical fillers donut holes, but their undeniable swag makes a case for them being the jelly filling.
On ""VCR,"" singer Romy Madley Croft admits that ""I think we're superstars / you say you think we are the best thing."" Whether this is said tongue-in-cheek or not is more or less irrelevant: by the time she repeats it alongside vocal partner Oliver Sim it's apparent that this—and the entirety of xx, it turns out—is the equivalent of pillow talk for them. They never raise their voices and never seem in any rush to get out of bed, but waste no time returning to it. Although it's not entirely clear whether these two co-singers are the subject of each other's affection, the lyrical dialogue is pretty clearly not meant for the entire public. This makes what is actually a highly personal album somewhat cold and, at times, excluding.
The album's ambience lends itself well to simple background noise, but the inherent subtleties prove most rewarding at maximal volume. ""Crystalised"" does the most on its own, featuring actual eighth-note melodies and layered instrumentation, but its delicacy is still its most prominent component. Void of any real hooks—as is the case with the rest of the album—the highs and lows are textural strokes that paint an arboreal landscape of primarily flatlands and wind-burnt trees. Struggling to sustain life, the terrain cradles the small, delicate greenery, fostering the little substance that is there.
At the end of the day, though, nearly all of The xx's strengths contribute to their main downfalls. They capitalize on vacancy, but the resulting sound is often skinny, too bare to stand up to abuse. In many ways, xx is a beautiful incarnation of the things too often discarded in today's throw away culture. In other ways it's a thin broth without enough ingredients to be served as its own dish. There's no doubt that there's value in much of discarded materials, but when stretched out to cover a whole album it becomes clear that some things don't receive equal attention for a reason. The xx have created an excellent accompaniment to the loneliness of love, but it's hard to see them repeating their success with their limited resources.
