Light, Bright

You know that part in that Girls song where Christopher is all exuberant & he goes Oh, I wish I had a suntan/I wish I had a pizza & a bottle of wine? Man, I am so there right now. (&, at the risk of completely changing the subject, am I the last person in town to know about the hardcore version of the video for that song? N(even remotely)SFW, btw.)

Anyway, I had my sunglasses on briefly this a.m., for the first time in like a week. bc it’s been raining here, yeah. In the wintertime here, the world gets gray & heavy & it gets good & wet. Plus there’s that whole getting-out-of-work-&-shit!-it’s-already-dark-out trauma on a daily basis. Sigh. Maybe that’s why all the music I seem to want to hear lately is bright & light & clean & nice.

I picked up Real Estate a couple of weeks ago, before all this weather started up. I liked it, but then promptly forgot all about it. Now all of a sudden it’s tonic for what ails me. It just puts me poolside, drinking rum & it’s not even lunchtime & oops it looks like I’ve gone & gotten myself a little bit drunk already but that’s OK I don’t have to be anywhere for hours & hours & damn the sunshine feels good on my face & yes I do think another round would be nice, merci beaucoup.

Yeah, it puts me right there:

Pool Swimmers - Real Estate

Beach Comber - Real Estate

So that’s nice. But you know what’s really grabbing me right now all of a sudden is the XX. I had heard that the XX were some kind of bfd at the CMJ this year, so whoop-de doo was my initial response to that. They’ve come through town here a couple of times lately now, opening for other bands, but I didn’t make it out to see them, & I really was not understanding all the fuss to be perfectly honest.

I mean, you hear the XX & you get it, more or less instantly. You think Yeah, I got it. Because this music is pretty simple, & it’s really pretty stark. Listen to any of their songs for roughly 60 seconds, & you have effectively heard every single sound in the musical palette of the XX. There’s no bombast here, no deep layers of sound that you only notice on the tenth listen, no sudden upheavals in tempo, dynamic, or volume.

VCR - The xx

Heart Skipped A Beat - The xx

Surprisingly now, though, I actually am on more or less my tenth listen to some of these songs. I’ve warmed up to the XX. Or maybe it’s just that the XX have warmed their way up to me, now that the season's weather outside is all, you know, frightful.

See, listening to summery music like Girls & Real Estate might put me momentarily in a fantasy place I’d like to be. & that’s nice, sure. But maybe the XX are putting my feet on the ground right here where I actually am. Here, where it’s warm inside while it’s cold out there. I can feel the cold in the music of XX, but it’s all outside, over there, while we are here, inside. Warm & dry & cozy. Oh yeah: & sexy. That’s what it took me all those listens to actually get: that the XX have, you know, a certain sort of something that's sexy.

So I'm listening to the XX & now I'm all Let It Snow.