xx (The xx, 2009)

Shortly after this album was released, The New Yorker's music critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a review, in which he discussed an early xx concert he attended on a lark.  The music, performed at a near-whisper, sounded aggravatingly sterile, and Frere-Jones left feeling confused and unusually irritated.  Then he heard the album itself, which is wonderfully intimate and emotionally resonant, and concluded that the band had constructed the record first without a thought to how it would sound live.  This is a reasonable conclusion.  It is also completely false.  The xx were playing shows for years before their debut, and developed the arrangement of each piece through a great deal of experimentation.

This basic misconception explains a lot about the xx.  Regardless of Frere-Jones' first impression, the xx is a band that fills football stadiums when they perform.  Yet there's no doubt that they do so on the strength of a single album, whose success they've had a great deal of trouble replicating.  Their second album was critically panned, and the songs on their third, forthcoming album have so far fallen a little flat in performance.  Perhaps the reason is that the band doesn't really understand why their music resonates with so many people.

The tags that we attach to this music - "minimalist" being the most important - were not intentional.  It's hard not to listen to the lead singers, male and female, and think that their music is not about a relationship, even though both are gay.  Clearly, the band deserves their success, but it's hard not to feel that there's a fundamental disconnect between them and the audience, and the group is going to have to reconcile this before they can move on.

In any case, the album is so good that they should have lots of time to do so.