The xx

The xx
The "Sound of Young London" Comes of Age
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Metro Pulse, March 2010



After a couple decades of ego-tripping, pill-popping, and general excess, the “Sound of Young London” moved in a decidedly more timid, modest, and romantic direction in 2009— a sea change spearheaded by a band of pale-faced, leather-clad 20 year-olds called The xx.

Unwitting rock stars if there ever were any, Oliver Sim (bass, vocals) and his childhood mate Romy Madley Croft (guitars, vocals) began their platonic musical partnership nearly five years ago while students at London’s prestigious Elliott School (also a former stomping ground for members of Hot Chip, Four Tet, and Burial). Here, they developed a rather uniquely 21st century style of collaboration, shyly exchanging song ideas and strings of suggestive lyrics via the relatively impersonal means of email and text messaging. Face to face, the two life-long friends felt a tad inhibited, but with a digital veil between them, Sim and Croft were able to translate their mutual teenage confusion into intimate, icicle-cool boy/girl seductions, many of which would feature prominently on The xx’s manically applauded self-titled debut album last year.

“I think it was very natural,” says Sim, speaking from a tour stop in Leeds, UK. “I don’t think we set out consciously to make any specific kind of music, or to try to emulate anyone. So, a lot of the uniqueness of it was maybe just happy accidents. Butit definitely came about very naturally rather than as some kind of contrived plan.”

While the UK press quickly adorned The xx with the aforementioned “Sound of Young London” tag, the uniqueness that Sim speaks about is really most evident in the band’s surprising maturity and restraint. Sim’s slinky basslines, Croft’s skeletal guitar parts, and the accompanying atmospheres of percussionist/producer Jamie Smith (and ex-keyboardist Baria Qureshi) favor mood, minimalism, and delicacy over big riffs or heavy overdubs. Stylistically, they stalk the same shadowy tunnels that New Order and Massive Attack once did, only with a softer step and fewer distractions.

“A lot of that simplicity on the record just started out as a result of our own limitations,” Sim says. “As we’ve grown as musicians, it’s become possible for us to complicate these parts and layer and fill out the sound. But at the same time, it’s something we’ve had to be very aware of—keeping that sense of restraint even as we evolve—because we all see the value in that simpler, more direct sound.”

It might seem odd for a 20 year-old kid to be talking about his artistic “evolution,” but lest it be forgotten, a person tends to change an awful lot between, say, freshman year of high school and freshman year of college. And so, while Sim and Croft managed to avoid nearly every calamity of the teen-penned love song on their debut (note the unorthodox embrace of insecurities on “Crystalised” or “Shelter”), their perspective on the subject matter has certainly changed over time.

“It’s definitely interesting,” Sim says. “Like, some of these songs were written when we were 16, and a lot of it was coming from expectation or observations of other people’s relationships. And now, as time has gone on, it’s more a case of drawing from our own personal experiences. Scarily, it’s gotten a bit darker as it’s gotten more personal, too [laughs]. I’ve noticed that.”

Indeed, The xx may be one of the darkest acts at a relatively colorful Big Ears Fest this year—both in terms of sound and style. On stage, the band is always donned in black, with the pale, pomapdoured Sim, in particular, looking a bit like the love child of Dave Gahan and Siouxsie Sioux—or possibly a sexually ambiguous street thug from a musical adaptation of Snatch.

“Yeah, we used to turn up to gigs a few years ago, in the beginning, and people would ask us if we played death metal,” Sim says, adding that he has never fancied himself a Goth, either. “So, I don’t know what our style really says about our music. But really, that’s not something we’ve ever concerned ourselves with. Like, if I turned up to a rehearsal in bright orange one day, Romy and Jamie wouldn’t send me home and tell me to change into black immediately [laughs]. I just think when you spend that much time together in a close group, you kind of pick up some things off one another.”

In other words, the black garb might just be a subconscious expressive of a bond between band mates, or perhaps more significantly, a bond between childhood chums.

“We all appreciate being able to do this with our best friends,” Sim concurs. “I can imagine it being really lonely out here without them.”

Dirty Projectors

Dirty Projectors
The Evolution of Brooklyn's Most Ambitious Bedroom Project
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Metro Pulse, March 2010



While Vampire Weekend may boast the larger font on the Big Ears Festival bill, it’s their Brooklyn cousins Dirty Projectors that are probably more ideally suited to the festival’s celebration of the offbeat.

Last year, dozens of year-end Top Ten lists heaped praise upon the Projectors’ sixth LP Bitte Orca—the afro-electro-art-pop extravaganza that anointed them the latest pied pipers of New York’s hippest borough. From one perspective, this record is the drum-tight culmination of nearly a decade’s worth of hit-and-miss experiments from the group’s Yale-educated, oppressively quirky mastermind Dave Longstreth. From another angle, though, it also serves as a non-threatening entry-point into Dirty Projectors’ considerably more intimidating back catalog.

Sure, fans of the slick, funky Bitte Orca single “Stillness Is the Move” might have a hard time wrapping their legs around Longstreth’s messy, self-indulgent dorm room tapes from 2002. But if you listen closely to those older albums, you can hear a highly ambitious artist planting the seeds for his own personal botanic garden.

Back Cataloging…

The Glad Fact (2003)

This was the first album issued under the Dirty Projectors moniker (Longstreth had previously released The Graceful Fallen Mango under his own name), and despite some beautiful moments, it mostly sabotages itself with forced, spray-painted eccentricities and a lot of yelping. On the surface, Longstreth sounds like a hi-fidelity artist limited by the clunkiness and noise of a lo-fi palette. In the 21st century, though, no such limitations really exist for the Yale student with a laptop, making The Glad Fact a tad less charming as a consequence. Also, there are several songs about finches.

Hints of Bitte Orca: “My Offwhite Flag,” “Naked We Made It”

Slaves’ Graves & Ballads (2004)

Originally a pair of EPs, “Slaves’ Graves” and “Ballads” were released as a combined LP in 2004, despite their extreme stylistic differences (the latter featuring just Longstreth and a guitar, and the former including some lush, James Horner-like arrangements from a mini chamber orchestra). Impressively, Longstreth seems quite comfortable on both sides of the disc, embracing the lovelier inclinations of The Glad Fact and allowing them to blossom here with fewer pretentious left turns. Longstreth’s voice also comes out of the shadows more in this collection, tackling some pretty heavy ballads with a quivery Arthur Russell-meets-Antony Hegarty delivery. For fans of Dirty Projectors’ sadder, slower moments, this is a must-have.

Hints of Bitte Orca: “Somberly, Kimberly” (sort of)

The Getty Address (2005)

Obviously, by 2005, Longstreth had reached the point in a young musician’s career where the only logical next step is a massive concept album about a suicidal Don Henley. Hence, we have The Getty Address—perhaps the pinnacle of both Longstreth’s quirkiness and ambitiousness. The album features about two-dozen different musicians—choral singers, horns, strings, junkyard percussion, the kitchen sink. While the orchestral flourishes can seem almost head-scratchingly out of place on some of Longstreth’s minimalist, melody-less glitch ballads, the whole thing starts to makes sense about halfway through, which makes it all the more disturbing in a way. There are some more finch songs, too.

Hints of Bitte Orca: “Warholian Wigs,” “Tour Along the Potomac”

Rise Above (2007)

After the Don Henley thing went over most people’s heads, Longstreth decided to slap on an extra layer of irony with another concept album—recreating Black Flag’s classic 1981 punk LP Damaged without having actually listened to the record in 15 years. Not surprisingly, only the song titles are particularly remindful of Henry Rollins. Instead, Rise Above became Longstreth’s bridge to the Afrobeat rhythms, noodling guitars, and soul-inspired female harmonies (Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian) that would help define Bitte Orca.

See: “No More,” “Rise Above”

Matmos

The Quirky & The Intense
Matmos Fit Right In at the Big Ears Music Festival
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Metro Pulse, February 2009



It’s hard to say whether a great music experimentalist is unusually focused or just easily distracted. For the moment, at least, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt would appear to fall into the latter camp.

“You have to come see this, Martin!” Daniel shouts giddily, pausing a moment before clueing me in on the excitement. “I’m sorry. Martin and I made one of those magic crystal trees. You remember those? It’s just little paper sticks and then you pour this magic liquid, and six hours later, these crystals form. We just made one last night, and when I went to bed it was still looking really scraggly and crappy, and I thought, well, the magic’s gone. It’s not working. But I woke up this morning and went down stairs and it was like WAM! These rainbow crystals had formed all around—it looks really cool.”

“Oh, Drew, it’s beautiful!” Schmidt chimes in from a second phone.

This seems like a fitting introduction to the electronic duo known as Matmos—veteran music collaborators and life partners whose approach to music composition is also a bit like turning paper sticks into crystal trees (the guys love the metaphor, not surprisingly).

After a decade in San Francisco, Matmos relocated last year to Baltimore, where Daniel had earned himself a little gig as Assistant Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. As a fortunate consequence, Matmos found a welcome home for its nouveau brand of "musique concrete" inside the highly imaginative and rapidly growing Baltimore scene.

“We feel lovingly embraced by Baltimore,” Schmidt says. “It’s a very fluid music scene, in that, I don’t think I’ve been in so many bands since I was 19 years old. I’ve been in like five new bands since I moved here. Some grow flowers and some whither away like time-lapse photography, but they are all fun. And it’s with all different people— kind of like an orgy room of partnering and repartnering.”

One of those so-called orgy room partners, in a presumably platonic sense, is Dan Deacon—the archduke of Baltimore’s indie scene, and another one of the big name performers taking the stage at the Big Ears Festival here in Knoxville. This news actually comes as a surprise to Drew Daniel, whose motivations for playing Big Ears always involved more than just the festival’s cast of all-star experimentalists.

“I think the shear incongruity of that kind of music in that part of the country appealed to me,” Daniel explains. “I grew up in Louisville, KY, so to me, that part of the country is not a place I’m suspicious of or condescending towards in the way I think a lot of people are.

“I think a lot of people who are in New York or L.A. kind of pooh-pooh the rest of the country and don’t really assume that people there have any curiosity about experimental work. But my experience, growing up in Louisville, is that I was totally famished for it, and really intrigued by the examples of it I saw around me.”

Big Ears attendees can expect to hear some material from Matmos’ latest LP (their seventh), Supreme Balloon, an album that continues the group’s tradition of mining creativity from restriction. In this case, the entire record was recorded exclusively with synthesizers, and with zero microphones. In many ways, it’s the duo’s most “accessible” album yet (a word they dislike), but it’s also garnering the usual quota of seemingly oppositional adjectives, including “quirky” and “intense.”

“That’s a great odd couple right there!” Daniel says with a laugh. “I don’t know if our music is intense, frankly. I guess some of what we do sounds silly. I’ve always liked humor in music, but mainly when it sneaks up on you sideways. To me, Nurse With Wound’s music is very funny in some places, but it’s not merely quirky in a sort of dreadful, Benny & Joon idea of what quirkiness means.”

“Oh no, not Benny & Joon,” Schmidt concurs.