Intelligence Records Bureau - Part 1

What the freakin' hell's this? I hear you ask. Well things have been a bit quiet on the old blogging front recently. Hence a burst of creative energy was required, which has manifested itself in the Intelligence Records Bureau. The IRB is a hand picked team of musical experts who have formed with the specific intention of listening to and reviewing one album per month (roughly). The reviews will be published on TTID along with scores on the doors and all manner of analysis (well actually I'll probably just average the totals or something). The IRB is governed by a very strict set of rules. We are just not sharing them with anyone else right now. Cliquey? You bet!

So here we go...

The xx - Coexist (2012)

Kev B

My first journey through the IRB has been a somewhat of a traumatic one for me. 

I tried to download the album but when I inputted xx into the search engine well I tell you

I've never seen so many pages of porn.

Anyway, after a week of trawling through the filth trying to find the goddam xx my computer crashed!

So Ian to the rescue and no, he did not remove the tit and fanny, but did provide the CD of Coexist.

  

So Monday morning driving to my workplace in Hessle, I played the CD however by the time I had

listened to 7 tracks  my want and wish was to drive straight past work and off the Humber Bridge.

Such was the dour and repetitive beat /drone /dross that I was listening to.

However, I have now listened to the album several times and been turned completely around and thoroughly enjoyed the majority of the tracks, in particular Angels, Reunion and Fiction.

I cannot decide the origin of the tune/beat however can imagine the steel drums been beaten

on the Caribbean islands.

70/100

Ian F

I used to hate the dominance of verse / chorus / verse songs.  Despite Dylan and the modernising minstrels of the mid sixties the archaic format was still almost obligatory up until only a couple of decades ago.  If you were a band who hoped to be heard on popular radio or even if your pretension was pitched leftfield of pure pop of it was still almost de-rigeur.  Dance culture and electronica changed much of that. 

I presume the electronic pop band The xx aspire to be a chart act.  They have the hooks.  They will appeal to the young, and the middle aged alike.  They will especially appeal to the couples in each of those groupings and even more so to the monied middling classes of each age stratum.  They should therefore be big in the same way that the EBTG audience grew large from behind Laura Ashley curtains.  

Unfortunately, although my better half seems to like Coexist I have a problem in that I miss any kind of song structure.  I hate to admit but I miss proper choruses.  The hooks heard here are memorable but merely refrains: “Being In Love With you as I am”; “My heart is beating in a different way” and “we used to be closer than this” are powerful, and poignant, and remain in the brain after just two or three plays but are lacking, as if unfinished.  Meanwhile the backing although it fits perfectly seems more like soundtrack music.  A soundtrack for a love affair?  Maybe.  I think that is what The xx hope but it is too manufactured.    I kept being drawn in but never captured.  I don’t know whether the vocalising protagonists are in a relationship or merely in a band together.  This album, despite lyrically exploring the traumas and travails of love doesn’t offer any clues.  They act out their songs well but are they electronica’s Burton and Taylor or merely Terry and June.

I imagine the three parts of The xx got together to make a certain kind of record.  An album of songs based on the traumas and travails of romance.  Yet, instead of getting together to express themselves musically and lyrically they made an album they thought would impress and sell and then went home to listen to Metallica. 

Still, I don’t dislike this album.  It infuriates as much by what it doesn’t do as much as it animates me by what it does.  During the records best bits there is something special going on.  Half way through ‘Re-Union’ there’s a most affecting moment.  A sudden change in tempo.  The last minute and a half has a the sort of muted, muffled, bass thud, your ears try to damp down to protect your mind after you stumble into a club after a long night of excess. The female vocals “Did I see you, see me, in a new light,” complete the murky, seedy, abstracted scene.  The end of that track syncs perfectly into ‘Sunset’. The mood stays the same. The throbbing, out of it, sound competes but then compliments the words “I saw you again it was like we’d never met”.  And “when I look into your eyes I see no surprise.”  These five minutes are certainly a highlights of this album.  The rest is good but by no means essential and I’m not totally convinced.  Perhaps, by the time of their third album when xx have learned a few more tricks, maybe have a little more time and encouragement to work further on their tracks, and write a couple of choruses – just to prove they can - , then I might believe.

67/100

Dave C

Please keep in mind that all reviews are essentially about the reviewer and how the item being reviewed chimes with their world view. So if anything written here makes you want to kill me, don’t worry, it just means you’ve got soul but, to clumsily extend the killer motif, you’re not a soldier. (Unless of course you are a member of her majesty’s armed forces, in which case, in addition to the desire, you probably possess the necessary skills and equipment to kill, and can therefore leave the worrying to me)

Anyway,  Co-exist by The xx

I wish I could like this album more than I do. The eschewing of extraneous instrumentation; linear sketch-like guitar lines subtly, sharply picked but guitars seldom strummed; little respect for conventional song structure; interesting use of sound textures and space; deep, deep bass and changes of rhythm; the gentle enveloping of velveteen voices. There is much to admire about their methods and the production skill, but its flaws are big ones. The old line about “What you don’t play being as important as what you do” is wrong. The space simply gives focus to what you do play and sing and the less you play and sing the better it needs to be. Whilst much of what is here is interesting, ultimately it lacks a real soul. Indeed I’ve never experienced a sound more lacking in soul than the echoy beat on Swept Away and would have gladly sacrificed a kidney for it to be replaced by someone hitting two bits of wood together or kicking a roller shutter door (anything that somehow related to the human condition would do). The (mostly) single word titles suggest that the lyrics will offer small snapshots and outline sketches about the changing status of the relationships, but  the words are disappointingly wan and uninspired, an example of speaking of emotions rather than truly expressing them. A bit like the trained actor from the animated series “Monkey Dust” Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim rely on the sound of their voices, but actually fail to imbue them with real emotional depth or sincerity. Their voices are the antithesis of those like Bill Callahan, Lou Reed and Tom Waites. Perhaps they just haven’t lived enough yet or perhaps I’m too old, but it to me it remains an attractive, unusual bud unbloomed.

63/100

Rich C

Well I will start by saying I feel like I have lived and breathed this album over the last few weeks. I have played it lots, both as background listening while working, driving, doing other stuff etc and also a couple of serious "sit down and really concentrate" sessions.

This is kinda unusual for me as I always have a backlog of music to get through and hence tend to play things once and then move on, but this little album has really got under my skin, and deflected me from the pile of vinyl, CDs, downloads etc that are looking at me pleadingly.

When I first heard of the xx I was somewhat put off by the comparisons with some of the quiet post punk era stuff that lots of the reviews mentioned, in particular the Young Marble Giants references, a band I was a huge fan of back in the early 80s. I have mentioned before on this blog the problem I sometimes have with modern bands who seem to really "feel the weight" of the history of popular music that has gone before, and can't shake off their oh too obvious influences. I expected the xx to follow that trend and thus I ignored their first album completely.

I did, however, hear a track or 2 from this their latest release, while listening to Jo Wiley in the car about a month ago. And found myself intrigued. Hence why I chose it for the IRB album.

What I have found over the last few weeks is that it is an album that really needs to be played loud, and listened to with complete concentration. In doing that, I found I got immersed in the atmospherics, the pulse of the bass and drum machine, the haunting vocals, and those lyrics that implant themselves in your head. The occasions when I played it more as background listening, I found the album was over before I had barely noticed it, with the songs all blurring into a mush of sameness. 

"My heart is beating in a different way", " do you still believe in you and me?" - these are lyrics with a depth of emotion that can have a deep effect on the listener if you allow it to. But you do need to give it that time and effort or it can seem somewhat ephemeral and not a little annoying in its sameness of atmosphere throughout. In short, play it twice over the course of a weekend with the volume up and the head thinking of nothing else. And it will get to you.

So...I have just written a review explaining how to listen to Coexist without mentioning much about the music at all. I guess the other reviews may well do more of that. What I will say is it is clearly written and performed by some musicians who have a lot of original ideas about creating modern music about relationships, and have the technical capability to put it across. In that sense they are doing what the Young Marble Giants did, but in their own way. Well done to them.

70/100

Tony D

I've listened to the album 6 or 7 times now. Twice at the gym, once whilst on a bike ride,  once whilst out walking and at least 2 or 3 times other than that.

Well the one thing I can say is,  it's not a foot tapper!

From the opener "Angels" through to "our song" that closed this dreamy assault on my eardrums, songs seemed to want to get going at times (and god I was willing them to!) but never did. The start of "Fiction" reminded me of the siouxie and the banshees song "happy house". I had to play the start over and over to finally get what it was that it reminded me of. Then low and behold on track 4,  ("Try")  I was transported back to Adam and the Ants! 

"Ants invasion"  was the song in question from "kings of the wild frontier" album. A couple more pretty  nondescript songs followed. Track 7 "missing" probably does exactly that! It does remind me however of the Frankie goes to Hollywood song "power of love" in places.  The album finished in a whimper with "our song".

For me this was very hard work. I wanted to enjoy but found that I wasn't moved. It's an album that I probably won't listen to again unless under duress.

30/100

Andy D

The first time I realised I liked this album is when I was listening to something else. Walking home from licenced premises, I put my ipod on shuffle and trudged onwards. Halfway through the journey, Fiction came on, and I smiled to myself with the oddly happy sensation you hear the beginning of a song you know you’re going to enjoy listening to.

I wasn’t so sure at first. It was obviously clever. Its meticulous minimalism and discordancy were skilful, and the echoey way the duets sounded as they were sung by two people urgently seeking one another at opposite ends of a large, dark room were compelling. But does that make it any good?

Eventually yes, when I peered through the soundscape towards the lyrics: “the end comes to soon; like dreams of angels” in the lovelorn lamenting of Angels, and “it felt like you really knew me; now it feels like you see through me” in Sunset’s slightly embittered finale. My favourite was Chained’s “Did I hold you too tight? Did I not let enough light in?”

It wasn’t perfect. The steel drum sound of Reunion jarred, and just occasionally you felt it was being a little too clever for its own good. I particularly didn’t like Our Song, which ended the album disappointingly. However it stuck to its guns. Halfway through I was wondering when a change of speed or direction may appear – in fact, I probably hoped for one, to break it up a little. That it didn’t yield to that temptation was typical of an album that always seemed to know exactly what it wanted to do.

75/100

Well - all that gives The xx Coexist an average score of 62.5. 

Next month's album, chosen by Kev B, is the new Madness album Oui, Oui, Si, Si, Ja, Ja, Da, Da. Which is released on 29th October. Looking forward to it.