The world’s biggest DJ is putting out an album in four days as part of a loosely-defined reggae group, but the far more interesting story in electronic music’s coming week is the release of Jamie xx’s long-awaited debut album: In Colour.
Those who follow the breathy British trio The xx know that Jamie, the band’s 26-year-old producer and creative mastermind, is its strongest link. Those familiar with his now-classic DJ sets for BBC and Boiler Room know that Jamie is an expert curator with a broad range of influences and knack for slowly building killer sets. And those few who’ve heard his production work for the likes of Drake and Gil Scott-Heron (RIP) know that Jamie’s an emphatic collaborator when it comes to creating soundscapes for those tracks in which artists choose to fully bare their souls.
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Even still, with all that knowing and with all of Jamie’s notoriety in the his home country—largely because of the disproportionate amount of time he spends in the UK, often playing surprise sets around London on a whim—stateside fame has eluded him in his six years in the industry. Maybe this by his own design: He’s famously standoffish in interviews and is only putting out a solo project now because he “just had all this music I’d made that I couldn’t finish” and needed a reason to put the final pieces together, as he recently told Grantland.
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More likely than self-sabotage, however, his failure to crossover may be a symptom of his making very non-American music. His tracks have no big drops or catchy hooks; there’s nothing for radio, and they won’t play it. He is a producer who specializes in crafting full and emotionally evocative songs, programming his drums with care, his synths with gentility and his vocals with precise layering. Unlike his contemporaries Afrojack, Avicii, and DJ Snake, who’ve found major fame in the U.S., Jamie is less inclined to pop hits and more interested in reinvigorating electronic music with a human touch, mixing the light with the dark to make songs that are both challenging and accessible, in turn touching our souls in new and unexpected ways.
Whether or not Jamie desires fame in the States, or whether people realize how inevitable his crossover is—and some have, by virtue of a recent single that features of-the-moment rapper Young Thug—In Colour is so good, so expansive, so flawless, that American fans smart enough to listen will have no choice but to be won over by the bashful Brit’s stylings. You really just can’t deny this thing. But they have to listen.
It’s been three years since the world’s heard a project produced by Jamie—The xx’s sophomore album Coexist, which traded in the trio’s hushed ballads for more dance-inclined anthems. It wasn’t a complete overhaul for the group, but Jamie’s voice was starting to shine through more clearly after he undertook production gigs outside of the group and was commissioned for remixes of songs by Florence And The Machine, Adele and Radiohead. On all of those ventures, Jamie offered up a variety of subtle takes on varyingly romantic and dejected tracks, but with Coexist, he’d clearly grown tired of scaling down and had something new on his mind, something lighter, more tropical, and generally, bigger.
In the time since that album, Jamie’s been at work with his bandmates on the group’s third LP, and he’s also discovered a side gig as an in-demand touring DJ, an oxymoron for such a shy figure. But while he’s reserved in the press, onstage and behind CDJs, Jamie’s a proud selector who thrives when exploring the far depths of his own musical education, notes of which pop up on his debut.
Like Jamie’s past few years, In Colour is about discovery—of self and of sound—with some tracks representing the moment when you’re forced to come to terms with unexpected change, be it adulthood or a changing relationship or the fact that you’re becoming better than the band you blew up with. Throughout the album, you get the sense you’re listening to something equally heartwarming and heartbreaking, something specifically built to shatter you at your core, likely a reflection of its artist’s own experience.
The very first sounds you hear on In Colour are some skittish, gritty jungle drums and a vocal sample of an Englishman shouting “Oh my gosh, easy easy!” presumably in response to some massive DJ set in a dingy London basement. The track is by all accounts the harshest of anything we’ve heard from Jamie, but it’s a palate cleanser and qualifier of what’s to come: a carefully designed journey into the mind of an observer who always seems to be looking inward, or longingly backward. Through vocal samples on “Gosh” and the equally rave-y “Girl,” Jamie revisits youth and evokes the highs of homesickness, how good it feels to reunite with the scene and friends you loved in your hometown. Elsewhere, he enlists his xx bandmates to croon about the yearning desires you often associate with the other, more painful side of coming home; the feelings of visiting your childhood haunts and drudging up memories long tucked away.
The melding of both ends of that spectrum is perfectly captured on the album’s second to last (and best) track, “The Rest Is Noise,” a five-minute epic journey through a Cosmos-sized spectrum of the feels. If the rest of Jamie’s debut is meant to build to some sort of grand understanding, “The Rest Is Noise” is that moment of forced clarity. With its its wistful synths and heartbeat drums fading slowly away before returning from the ether with menacing haste, you’re at once resolute with your life decisions and bewildered by where to possibly go from here. It’d be scary if it wasn’t so damn euphoric.
A friend who works for a major label recently lamented how painful it is to watch artists who strive deeply for success not achieve it, while watching those who couldn’t care less come out with chart-topping albums, almost as if by accident. Jamie xx falls somewhere between the two categories, a contributing factor to why, despite the pure genius that fills this album—and it is genius—In Colour won’t make Jamie a star. He is a extremely talented producer who seems to passively want the world’s ear, only so it could hear what modern electronic music can sound like if only it had more of a human touch. But unlike the UK, where great music seems to hold higher precedent than public persona, to thrive in America you often have to be a shameless “brand,” an in-your-face representation of all the cool things you claim to represent. The only thing Jamie seems to want to represent is his inescapably earnest music, but here, earnestness is not celebrated, nor is it rewarded.
We may never get another solo album from Jamie xx. And with the anticipation for The xx’s forthcoming albums and likelihood that he’ll again be called upon to produce for Drake or Florence or Kanye or whomever else is smart enough to hire him, we may never even get another solo song. And so, Jamie will remain that that timid, brand-less guy who scores genius production credits and idles in the back of the stage at The xx’s stadium shows and once released a near-perfect electronic album.
Still, for those of us lucky enough to dig deeply into In Colour, I have no doubt it’ll go down as an under-the-radar testament to the present, when we yearned for electronic music that made us reflect and release in equal measure, all while offering us something vaguely familiar yet entirely new. And when we look back on electronic music’s current close-up, as the Calvin Harrises and Zedds of the world rule pop radio and Zac Efron plays an aspiring DJ in a major motion picture, it will have been important to have a foil like Jamie, who knew that the genre’s fans wanted to be treated like any other fans, and actually be engaged in both sides of the brain.
Dan Buyanovsky is here for the good times. Follow him on Twitter.
