The xx: Coexist (2012)

(Young Turks)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There seems to be some mild eccentricity to the way I'm hearing this, as there was for Radiohead's The King of Limbs and its blatant but blatantly ignored tributes to dance-floor boffing; it all rests on what seems to me a pervasive and incorrect notion that pop music knows of only one way in which to be sensual. Bosh to that -- is anything sexier than the high-pitched weirdness of Mickey & Sylvia's "Love Is Strange" or Brian Wilson's androgynous role-playing on "Don't Worry Baby"? Forget the lyrics for a moment. For me there's something deeply, woundingly lovely about the very same elements of Coexist that have led so many to declare it a crashing, sparse bore -- the glitchy little beats that Jamie xx pops in and then forgets about, his array of half-formed distant sounds, and that almost uncomfortably intimate way that Oliver Sim and Romy Croft's voices meld together and cancel one another out. I swear I'm not hearing this simply because I fell hard for this album while sitting in an upstairs study room next to my betrothed. Am I?

Coexist calls back strongly to a few key trip-hop influences without actually copping to any of their musical totems; it isn't Everything But the Girl, it just runs with Tracey Thorn's ideas of how to express loneliness, emotional need and empathy in both lyrics and vocals while stripping the music down to its core. Only at one moment does this come across as something like a dance record, and that's a brief interlude in "Swept Away" which fades off quickly after a gradual transformation. But for all the aural minimalism, everything here rests on tension and soulfully big ideas -- that whole questionmark of young love (always young, because that's all there really is, right?), its obsessions and twistings and the simple questions of trying to live: the ones about how "we will be us," but how do you do that? Can you talk through all of it? Is life ever too short? Is a family formed by anything but compromise, and how much do you talk of it before it's time to give up? Can you depend on the idea that we'll always at least try for a while before we give up?

On a record that lives and dies by its songwriting, the personal-experience sourcing of these thoughts are everything, and Jamie xx senses this, evidenced by the brilliance of his unshowy precision here, which absorbs everything he's taken away from his whirlwind career since 2009. A nocturnal, wintry still overtakes these songs, but they remain distinctive because there are no distractions whatever. From "Angels" onward, it all seems to emanate from one's own skull and/or body -- it's aware of its drama but so carefully expresses it, "being as in love with you as I am," because it senses the actual universal importance of its themes. It's all a big romantic slowdance about how fucked up we are but maybe it will be okay? It will if we sing about it, right?

Hard to pick out highlights, harder still to avoid singling other bands out to make points that don't really need to be made (like how this is "soft rock" far more challenging and dangerous than you-know-who's). Hard still to get over the dually sympathetic agonizing of the two central voices -- Jamie Smith makes it all sonically agreeable but it's still a resonant contrast that drives a barely-sensed narrative, wisps swinging along like "we used to be closer than this" but told mostly with less explicitness. The story is all left turns and emotive transitions; it's not verbal, nor is love, but it's concerned in some way with the reconciliation of rationality with romance -- a struggle we all have to consider even if we can't conquer it. The hushed, heartfelt singing goes a long way. Jamie's like a sympathetic third wheel, just providing a stage, but he's what gives the thing its teeth.

Maybe you have to be a bit of a freakshow to think of this as the dance music of cold nights and wet streets, but it doesn't seem perverse or overly revealing to me to cast all this as an exploration of the sexuality of smallness. There's little about "Fiction" or "Missing" that's grand, but they both feel major. Croft's voice wails out wordlessly on the latter somewhere behind Sim's begging. Smith cuts off all the lights and preps during a pregnant moment for a stunning return, and then "my heart is beating in a different way." True love, right? The ringing guitars on "Fiction" are like a gravestone for the last few years and all their nostalgia-baiting within the genre subset to which this band belongs, ably contrasted by the Trent Reznor pounding on the verses, twice over when you notice the feverishly sincere romance and its vague suggestions of club hedonism call back to, of all things, U2 in the Pop period -- that band's final years as an interesting and artistically adventurous outlet -- sans bombast. Don't laugh, it's a more salient comparison than the more superficially obvious St. Etienne, who this year have no use for minimal, careful, sub-pop anything if they ever did.

I feel like maybe I'm overstressing Jamie xx's contribution here, but whereas his bandmates are what addict me to this and keep me coming back to it, it's Smith who makes it tick. His use of silence, for instance, is mindbendingly smart, and the oddball rhythms and sonic hidden-room fuckery are as surprising as they are easy to seep into. Point being, he gives the others room. By "Tides," which has an actual beat, the close listener is surely seduced. It comes together slowly as a harmonized anthem of sorts, a cry of "some things have lost their meaning" underscoring its depth of wanting. Bliss and loss are both inarticulate here, as they should be. I mean, "you don't answer when I call / I would've given you it all"? Fine, that's art, license, whatever. "Out of sight, out of mind / It doesn't mean you're not mine"? That's such a home run it hurts.

So there's the big secret, to romance in Hollywood and rock & roll and everywhere -- we need it because it's a comfort, even when it's the "real" thing, not the imagined thing, but the warm body that tells us the truth and sometimes -- hey, I said sometimes -- the truth is exactly what we need to hear, and that's young, old, middle-aged love, etc., in and out of study rooms and bedrooms and your lover's softly lit apartment, everywhere.

And that is the story of the LP record in 2012.