Review: Coexist - The xx

A Mercury prize and UK Top 10 album in 2010 threw the dreamy vocals and understated beats of The xx onto to the mainstream music scene. After a year off they return with eagerly awaited second studio album Coexist.

Inspired by club music and centred on love, Coexist is a musical work of art, held together by Jamie Smith’s almost flawless production. The break was obviously good for the band, as this record is more intense, and yet somehow more spacious, than their debut. Like the multi-coloured oil and water design on the sleeve, the tracks run and blend into one another in a steady stream of emotion. However, it’s clear that this was intended more as a dance record than XX was, with undulating club beats bringing definition to Reunion and Sunset.

There are unmistakable throwbacks to older material on tracks like Missing, where the sound at times resembles the more sophisticated from the first album like Infinity and Fantasy. Generally, Coexist is more considered and cohesive than its predecessor though, presenting itself as a more conceptual album by a band who have become more mature and experienced in what they are doing. Try and Unfold are its weaker moments, becoming a little vague and nondescript in sound, but these songs still work within the album context in a way that VCR and Basic Space seemed to disappoint owing to their anomalous reversion to straight pop.

Lyrically, the album is characteristically minimalistic, but Oliver and Romy’s vocals bring a profound, heartfelt quality to simple lines like ‘Were we torn apart/By the break of day’ and ‘What have you done/With the one I love’. It’s believable and utterly romantic, an album to fall in love to. The sound Jamie has created ripples and shimmers, oscillating around the whispered vocal with a harmony that has made this band famous. Many of the tracks, like Reunion and Missing, suddenly break off in the middle before starting up again in a pulsing beat, making it an album that could be started at any point and still make sense. As the band decided to stream Coexist before its formal release, this really became the case as there was little definition between tracks when played as a whole album, meaning that it really could flow from beginning to end.

For this reason, it seems somewhat appropriate that the standout pieces are in fact the beginning and the end. The opening chimes of Angels entice almost hypnotically as Romy’s ‘Light reflects from your shadow/It is more than I thought could exist’ pull us in further. Refrain ‘Being as in love with you as I am’ summarises the whole of Coexist instantly. At the other end of the album, concluding track Our Song is shudderingly beautiful in its simplicity. It’s a reflection on love and being in love, and performs perfectly as an understated showstopper, a memory of the intensity of the album as a whole.

Coexist demonstrates an exploration of genres, and takes the best parts of XX and refashions them in an entirely different way, in a thirty-seven-minute love song ‘with words unspoken/A silent devotion/I know you know what I mean’. And anyone who has listened to this album certainly does.

KLH