When the Sky Drops All Those Feathers (School of Seven Bells & The xx @ South Street Seaport/Alela Diane & Sharon Van Etten @ Union Hall, 8-14-09)

Front to back, then:

I shrugged, at first, at the debut record from London's The xx (myspace).  It's short and spare enough to feel slight and the writing is upfront and unexceptional.  But it's gotten under my skin.

The xx - Shelter (mp3)(buy now from Rough Trade/Amazon (import) or preorder domestic release )

The vocals on the record often present a back-and-forth between Romy, the female guitarist, and Oliver, the bassist.  (His absence on "Shelter" adds weight to the song's question marks.)  They find the right combination of vulnerability and cool.  It helped me to think of The xx as The Kills the morning after, having fucked away all the tension and the urge, left to explore levels of commitment or regret.

So I was disappointed to hear there are four people in the band.  There do not need to be.  They line up straight across the stage, on Friday they all wore mostly black.  The bookends - a percussionist who finger taps beats from an electronic keypad, a keyboard player who wears a guitar and sometimes plays neither instrument - would be more of a nuisance if the two leads showed some chemistry.  Romy is great in that she doesn't look like the pixie most would push as a frontwoman; her voice is honey when it's in tune.  Oliver's is balm.  He's tall and lean and no cover idol either; Friday he looked flushed and puffy-eyed, drink or fear, I don't know.  But they both - they all - have the stage presence of wet paint.  They ran through their songs verbatim and said "Thanks" and the band's name (nothing funny but the capitalization, it's pronounced "the eks-eks") a couple of times.

They might be twice as good with half the people.  I'm not a fan of playback, but if Romy and Oliver worked on top of a recorded beat and lost whatever touches Bored Girl #4 brought then they'd automatically have a relationship to rub their songs against.  At the very least, watching two dull people is not as frustrating as watching four dull people.

At one point I just closed my eyes and the concert became ten times better.

Because the music is good.  There's a lot of quiet in there.  And some unexpected surprises.  Oliver's halted underwater Caribbean delivery on "Basic Space."  The way "Infinity" hints around Chris Isaac's "Wicked Game."  (The band seems to want to make a stronger connection to R&B than they have.  "Stars" apparently owes some sort of debt to Missy Elliot's "All N My Grill."  An underwhelming cover of Aaliyah's "Hot Like Fire" is a b-side.  They might be better off taking a crack at Sade?)

As Bill pointed out from the sidelines, it's nice to listen to a sound that's neither cowarding behind a wall of fuzz nor clamoring for attention in every single channel.  It's not so much that the band uses space well, it's not so much that they're precise.  They've stripped everything away and arranged for pauses and silences.  The writing is unexceptional, but it's naked.  They sing simple things and let unspoken intimacies hang in the air.  In "VCR," one sings to the other, "You, you know.  You just do."

tags: the xx  concert reviews  

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