The Xx
Coexist

A tweet alerts me that the new album by the XX is available for streaming on the official site and thus, devoid of any guilt from illegal file downloading, I rush to listen to it: life made easy! The debut album struck me not so much for the originality of many songs and the refined minimalist sound, but rather for the uproar that reviewers, magazines, critics, and hipsters from around the world created around it. It seemed like an album that the music industry hadn't seen in ages. Did the XX really deserve a place in the history of English music right from the start? In my opinion, it requires two things: time and the second album.

What else to do but listen and then judge the (always crucial for any band) second work, Coexist? The XX - Coexist Let's go in order: Angels is the single that preceded Coexist and opens the record. There's only Romy's female voice for now, and I must say that as an opening, it's not bad at all: she enchants and envelops the listener, over a well-crafted mix of delayed guitar (very unique), bass, and strings. Everything is always as minimalist as usual, but the chorus pleasantly sticks in your head after just a couple of listens, well done! But alas, I have to change my mind, with Angels we are already at the peaks of Coexist. Afterwards, a slow and inexorable downward slope towards vast and wide plains where one occasionally glimpses some other convincing episode, and for the rest, it feels like listening to a band that does nothing more than shuffle the same ingredients in all possible combinations: nocturnal atmospheres, music stripped to the bone, a bit of reverb, male voice and female voice that sometimes sing alone, sometimes together. Islands stands for the first album as Angels stands to Coexist: unfortunately, now everything else is boredom, just a reheated soup.

The monotonous voice of Oliver Sim further lulls the work, never a high note, never a change of register, just a boring and horizontal speech that neither manages to excite nor impress for technique or else. By the fourth track (Try), Oliver and Romy sing together over a sweet electronic melody, more interesting than usual, but again, nothing concludes: surely the minimal approach they adopt is interesting, but nothing stirs in this album, there is no piece where there is some change in rhythm, solos, or notable instrumental parts. Romy delights us only at the start, the rest is just a detached singing, unconvincing, did she stop by the studios just to pass the time? The result? The listener, at least as far as I'm concerned, finds themselves disoriented, the computer indicates that we've reached the seventh track, but no one notices because, let's be clear and blunt, Coexist is all the same, flat and it seems just a faded copy of the debut album.

The music seems more suited for an ambient genre, but even here some choices appear incomprehensible: 11 tracks with an average duration of three minutes that, even if they had something interesting to say, didn’t have the time to do so. I reach the last track, Our Song, hoping for a “twist-in-the-tail”, but here too I get involved by the cosmic void in person. An eternal boredom that, I regret to admit, only serves to induce sleep. Will the hipsters have the courage to acclaim Coexist? I don't care, I'm going to sleep! A live show of theirs? Sure, in my room, in pajamas! Good night http://coexist.thexx.info/