Pop & Hiss

The L.A. Times music blog

Category: the xx

Live review: The xx, Warpaint at the Hollywood Palladium


Oliver Sim, Romy Madley-Croft and Jamie Smith impress and show confidence; ascendant local band Warpaint opens.

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In the middle of their set Wednesday night at the Hollywood Palladium, the xx announced that this was the first tour it's been on where all members could legally drink. “Cheers,” singer-bassist Oliver Sim intoned, before taking a bird-like sip.

It was a succinct reminder that Londoners Sim, singer-guitarist Romy Madley-Croft and programmer Jamie Smith have put scant years between dreaming in their bedrooms — one imagines a collective chamber covered in vintage Depeche Mode posters — and winning prestigious British award the Mercury Prize for their impeccable self-titled 2009 debut album of minimalist synth-pop.

The show, opened by Warpaint, local rising stars whose Rough Trade debut will be released in October, also functioned as a succinct reminder of the raw potency of teenage dreams, endless fodder for bleeding hearts bent over their Casiotones. There is longing for sex, money and power, but when the xx closes its eyes, it sees intimacy.

Clad in all black, Madley-Croft stood out front on the stage, surrounded only by a few smoke-filled cones of light, singing the first few lines of “Shelter,” a song about finding closeness and the insecurity that comes when it's all too easily threatened. There was little more than a few scratches at the bass and guitar to pad Madley-Croft's conversational vocals. Her voice is one of the band's best assets — velvety but still modest, a precision instrument perfect for delivering pillow talk for goths.

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The xx's Oliver Sim talks Mercury Prize, the end of privacy, and playing small music in huge rooms

Oliver If you haven't already secured a ticket to the xx's sold-out victory lap at the Hollywood Palladium tonight, put the "Islands" video on loop and get comfortable, because they're going to be gone for a quite a while.

This show caps an incredible year for the trio, having won the U.K.'s biggest music-industry garland, the Mercury Prize, played to enormous crowds at the world's most tasteful festivals, and finally figured out that they can walk around a bit onstage.  

We talked with 21-year-old vocalist and bassist Oliver Sim about writing such intimate tunes for a massive audience, how teenage lust feels from the other side of 20, and what a crowd of 30,000 in the Indio sun really looks like from onstage.

Congratulations on your Mercury Music Prize. I'm guessing you probably didn't anticipate this for your band when you started it.

It was so surreal. It was thinking that when we’d started this band, if I could have seen us four years later, I wouldn’t have believed it at all. Especially as this cycle is all coming to an end and this is our last tour of the States for a long while, it’s just an incredible way to come to the end of this period, to summarize it with an award like this. 

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Is there a breakout in this year's Mercury Prize lot?

The nominees for this year's Barclay Mercury Prize, a sought-after British award bestowed upon left-of-center releases, contains a number of already familiar names to music fans on these shores. The concise electronic romance of the xx, the reflective neo-soul of Corinne Bailey Rae and veteran rock 'n' roller Paul Weller are among the crop of finalists, which in 2009 went to the jazzy acoustic hip-hop of Speech Debelle

Though the Mercury Prize takes a more expansive approach than most major U.S. awards, it's rarely simply a collection of unknowns. Past nominees have included the likes of Radiohead and Robert Plant, and this year singer/songwriter Laura Marling and rapper Dizzee Rascal make return appearances on the nominee list for their recent albums. 

Fast-rising folk rockers Mumford & Sons scored a 2010 nomination, as did Sub Pop indie rockers Foals. Scottish rockers Biffy Clyro, vocally adventurous rock experimentalists Wild Beasts, jazz act the Kit Downes Trio and Manchester nap rockers I Am Kloot help round out the nominees

Of the relatively unknown artists, worth keeping an eye on is Domino's the Villagers. Led by Conor J. O'Brien, the Irish act released its debut, "Becoming a Jackal," in the spring of this year, and it's an elegantly atmospheric effort, with spacious melodies, ghostly harmonies and dark poetics. The Villagers will be at Hollywood's Hotel Cafe next Tuesday (July 27), performing an early 8 p.m. set. Tickets are $14.50. 

Other recent winners have included Elbow, the Klaxons, the Arctic Monkeys and Antony and the Johnsons. Winning the award doesn't necessarily foretell industry success, though, and some of the bigger overseas breakouts in recent years, including La Roux and Amy Winehouse were runner-ups. The Mercury Prize is a cash award chosen by a panel of U.K. industry professionals. 

-- Todd Martens


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On the charts: The hunt for some non-'Glee' good news

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In another slow week on the U.S. pop chart, no album tops the six-figure mark in sales, and reworked versions of pop hits continue to dominate the tally. Just a few weeks removed from when Justin Bieber led the Billboard charts with only 60,000 in sales, the latest soundtrack to Fox series "Glee" logs a second week at No. 1, racking up about 63,000 in sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 

"Glee -- The Music Volume 3: Showstoppers" has roped in 199,000 in sales in its two weeks of release, and keeps a comeback album from the Stone Temple Pilots to the No. 2 position. STP's self-titled effort, coming nearly a decade after the band's last, sold just under 62,000 copies. As far as '90s artists on the comeback trail go, STP logged a stronger first week than Courtney Love's recent "Nobody's Daughter," which bowed last month with about 22,000 copies sold and has since disappeared from the the top 200. 

The only other newcomer in the top 10 belongs to the Nas & Damian Marley collaboration "Distant Relatives," which settles in at No. 10 after selling about 25,000 copies. Things are expected to get shaken up next week, when easy-going beach crooner Jack Johnson will enter the chart with his "To the Sea." Billboard is already predicting that Johnson will sell in the 250,000 range, but reports that sales are still trending down about 13% when compared with 2009. 

With few major releases, things certainly seem bleak. But there's a success story or two in the making. Brooklyn noise-duo the Sleigh Bells are nesting at No. 165, but the act's "Treats" has sold 21,000 copies in three weeks of release. That number is digital-only, as the album was not made available to physical retailers until Tuesday. 

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The xx conjures Bob Fosse: "Islands" video reinvents a classic style

The new video for "Islands" by the xx, one of the best songs on its self-titled debut album, has one clear, loving inspiration: Bob Fosse. All those intertwined arm and hand moves, the jerky rhythmic body shifts, the spazz-out bursts. Directed by Saam Farahmand, it's a remarkable homage to Fosse, a musical spirit whose 1960s and '70s dance maneuvers -- and that's what they were, precise, rhythmic maneuvers -- are coming back in vogue. Beyonce has acknowledged that her "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" video was influenced by the famed choreographer, and this xx clip will hopefully nudge the late body-mover back into vogue (pun intended). Fosse, best known for his work as director/choreographer of "Cabaret" and "All That Jazz," and the wonderful "Liza with a Z" television special from 1972, died in 1987. Watch the clip below. It will make you happy.

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