Published 2024-09-20 07.00
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full screen Jamie XX is back with his first solo album in nine years, where he collaborates with Robyn, among other things. Photo: Alasdair Mclellan
ALBUM No other genre was affected as much by the pandemic as dance music. A total shutdown was required for one of the genre’s most celebrated artists – Jamie XX – to rediscover the love of music.
Jamie XX
In waves
Young/Playground
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DANCE MUSIC Jamie XX was ahead of his nine-year-old solo debut ”In colour” caught an ecstasy of solitude. The feeling of disappearing in the big city crowd or being a stranger in a club.
Since then, a small pop cultural eternity has passed. A pandemic has come and gone. A gap in existence that influenced dance music more than any other genre. DJs and producers were forced to give up their livelihood, touring, to instead stay at home and actually make music. This led it to a more introspective dance music that today is increasingly approaching pop.
When covid arrived, the lavishly paid festival and club gigs were no longer an option for Jamie XX either. All that remained was the home and the studio. Suddenly, the 35-year-old began to enjoy the creative process, well, the music again.
During the same period, illegal rave parties appeared on barges and boats in London’s Regent’s Canal. The world was about to end anyway – so what to do? Jamie’s mind wandered to the hedonistic rave era. Much of the second album took shape during this time, when new material was tested on secret dance floors.
“In waves” begins like a gentle sunrise, with a piano in the foreground and a beat that comes and goes. One of the Briton’s greatest merits is the way he kind of twists and turns his dance music so that it becomes just as important in headphones as it is in the club. The curly-haired record collector cuts and pastes a collage of disco, acid house, tropicalia, hip-hop, northern soul and funk. In visiting The Avalanches he has one of his few contemporary equals.
As an 18-year-old hit James Smithas he is actually called, through as a producer in the most important pop band of the 10th century The XX. They became the indie act that Beyoncé went to see live with husband Jay-Z and then sampled. A door-opening debut that soon made Jamie XX one of the world’s most in-demand producers suddenly associated with names such as Drake, Radiohead and Adele.
In “Waited all night” he reunites with the band members Romy and Oliver Sim in the trio’s first joint music since 2017. Just like in the case of The XX, it’s about bittersweet and empathetic pop music.
Jamie with guests (Honey Dijon, Panda Bear and more) then lets the album toss between moods at an almost exhausting pace. “Baddy on the floor” is yster vintage funk that is probably best suited late at night. In “Daffodil” is sampled Astrud Gilberto to a rowdy 00s beat. “Still buzzer” sounds like its name; like a night when everything is beautifully blurred, dissolved.
The horned one Robyn-the single “Life” and “The feeling I get from you” capture the love, or even more, the music and the community in a dance floor ecstatic context.
In the finale “Falling together” there is a feeling of gratitude for the joy of sampling. To the dancer Oona Dohertys voice an impeccable and cosmic disco unfolds. Listening to it is like staring out over an endless ocean or looking down from an alpine peak. Sometimes the music just wins. You become so liberatingly small in front of it.
BEST TRACKS: ”Wanna”.
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