THE XX
xx
The list is littered with debut albums this year, but none of them are perhaps more of a statement than xx. It's only barely a year since the already iconic cover hit the shelves, but already new bands, or even old bands' new albums, are being spoken of to be in lieu of xx, to reminisce it. That's pretty impressive, considering the band's main philosophy seems to be the good old 'less is more'. Here is no plethora of guitars, sea of synth blips and blops or armories of percussion. The magic opener 'Intro' is basically nothing but a beautifully reverbed guitar, a bit of sample drums here and there and the bands' two intimate vocalists, their yin-and-yang'ish vocal work being a recurring pleasure on the album, eggingly ooing and humming, all on a bed of mellow synth strings. 'Intro' delivers the message perfectly: There's no fucking around. Xx is a remarkably secure and profoundly original debut, rightfully shortlisted for this year's Mercury Prize, and the first near-half of the record, all the way up to and including the touching 'Heart Skipped A Beat', is absolutely impeccably masterful. What eventually sends xx all the way down to the eighth spot is the continuation of the aforementioned sentence: The album does seem to wane considerably in quality, and although 'Basic Space' and 'Night Time' are decent tracks, the back-end 6 tracks just don't hit the nail on the head the same way the five first do.
DELPHIC
Acolyte
Delphic's debut album Acolyte is, I think, best described as a 51-minute long roller coaster ride with numerous spins, loops, twists and turns. Not that the sound of the album twists and turns all that much - through the entire length of the album, we are treated with aggressive, potent, indie-electro that can be both straight-to-the-bone rocking like on 'Clarion Call', slow and persuasive like on 'Counterpoint' and 'Remain', hit list potential like on 'Doubt', or just plain epic like on the behemoth 'Acolyte', the title track itself, around which the album seems to revolve. To continue the roller coaster reference, 'Acolyte' is the wildest of the bunch. This is the Kingda Ka. The way the track transmorphs at 5:35 to an even more eclectic climax than the one just passed, that's just pure excellence and gut. I have always been fond of bands that understand to employ synth arpeggiators, think homegrown bands such as Marvel Hill and Spleen United, and Delphic is definitely band music, and as such, could be construed as 'rock'. It is however, almost as electronic as rock will ever become, and it appears clear, that the Manchester foursome is at their most comfortable when they're nudging their potmetres. As such, Delphic present a refreshingly new take on the perennial merging of indie and the dancefloor, although Acolyte seems to have ended up as more of a listener's album than a party album. There are very few sub par tracks on this album, which deserves to be mentioned among this year's best debuts, if the indie-folk and lo-fi geezers dare.
THE TEMPER TRAP
Conditions
Watching indie develop has been one of the most exciting things in music through the past decade. We've seen indie-pop like Phoenix and Vampire Weekend, indie-electro like Hot Chip, indietronica like a plethora of bands, indie-folk like Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes and so on and so forth, indie-psychedelica like MGMT. We've had dance-punk, we've had new-rave, we've had shoegaze. But how about indie rock? Well, that has become sort of a weak term, since many of the acts considered indie aren't considered rock, and many of the acts considered rock aren't considered indie. Rock has been left to giants of post-punk revival (such as Interpol), garage-revival (such as The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys) and new school rock'n'roll (such as Kings of Leon). Indie rock has been left to very few bastions, including Bloc Party, who themselves turned considerably electro on their last album. Enter The Temper Trap - a young, talented foursome from beat city, Melbourne, VIC. These guys fill just exactly the void I've drawn up above: They're decidedly indie, and they're most definitely rock. And fortunately, they do their thing in brilliant style on their debut album Conditions, a refreshingly simple album of... Yeah, indie rock music. Standout tracks such as 'Rest', 'Sweet Disposition', 'Fader' and the orgasmically intense 'Science of Fear' should leave no doubt about the amazing dynamics of this band - this is Kings of Leon without all the American rock'n'roll wank that makes them dull. A superb album!
FOALS
Total Life Forever
So, atop these three young, debuting bands hovers the sophomore. However a Mercury Prize-shortlisted sophomore, a very deserved honor for Foals' Total Life Forever, a real slow-burner, on which all reviewers seemingly agreed to emphasize the need of hearing the album a dozen times before it sinks in. The Oxford-fivepiece showcased a lot of their talent and potential on debut album Antidotes, and has followed that up by expanding musically in almost every direction possible. It's their newfound groove and swagger on 'Miami', 'Total Life Forever' and 'This Orient'. It's their subtle yet delightful employment of electronic wooti-wooti on 'Alabaster' and '2 Trees'. It's how front man Yannis Philippakis has turned from whinesome yelper to actual singer. And it's their powerfulness on 'What Remains', 'After Glow' and the majestic 'Spanish Sahara'. The album starts out promising, but with this iconic and extra terrestrially impressive track, it really takes off, and rockets Foals into the upper echelons of art rock. From here, Total Life Forever doesn't look back, and the bottom two-thirds of the album is an overabundance of well-written, characterful and catchy songs. It contains a lot of the parts that make an album a truly great one - the tracks' ability to stand out for themselves, and to reveal themselves to you in vastly different paces, and the constant alternation between intensity and sensitivity, between gumption and pensiveness.
