When I was in college in the mid-90's I used to love music that was full of chaos, experiments and happy accidents. Nothing was more boring than an album where everything sounded like it happened "on purpose." If a review described a band as "shambolic" I bought the album. The results weren't always pleasant to listen to, but they were always surprising. And you got the feeling that the musicians were just as surprised as your were.I was in a band myself. We were all about 19 years old and willfully ignorant of anything approaching traditional songcraft. Our standard songwriting model was to noodle aimlessly until we hit on something that sounded cool, even if we had no idea WHY it sounded cool. "What chord was that?" The other guitarist would often ask me. "I don't know" was usually my reply. And this attitude wasn't just reserved for us kids. At the same time guys like Thurston Moore were trying their best for forget how to play guitar. He would endlessly invent new tunings for his instrument to ensure that, when the critical moment came, he wouldn't know what the fuck he was doing. Matthew Sweet, burdened with every page of the popcraft playbook already burned into his brain devised the clever workaround of not telling his lead guitarist Richard Lloyd anything about the songs he was about to record until the tape was rolling. That process led to some decidedly unhinged solos, such as the one that graces "Sick of Myself," off of the album 100% fun. And it works! The headlights come on and Lloyd scampers like a startled squirrel through the thick untrimmed shrubbery of Sweet's front-and-center rhythm guitar. What might have been another lifeless power-pop exercise is given a shambolic jolt of life.
Less successful were my own college band's experiments with musical chaos. Sometimes noise is just noise. But before giving up I did learn one enduring musical lesson from the experience, and it was completely by accident. Not the kind of accident where I played a G hypophrygian mode over an A flat minor progression and discovered an entirely now harmonic structure. It was the kind of accident where my guitar came unplugged from it's amp and nobody, including me, noticed until the song was over. After that I realized that my band, or at least my contribution to the band, was kind of bullshit, and I discovered a taste for music that was a little more carefully composed. I wanted musicians who heard the music in their heads before they committed it to tape; who didn't just hit record then clean up the mess afterwords. In short I wanted music that sounded like it was "on purpose."
Which brings me to the XX. If you want more purposeful music than this then I suggest the classical music aisle. They may not be the most skilled musicians in the world, but they could be the most disciplined, or at least the most disciplined band of teenagers to self-produce their own album. This, their first album, was recorded when they were only 19 years old. Here is a band where the old cliche "not a note out of place" is finally apt. Check out the track "Intro," literally just a short, nearly instrumental, intro to the album. It's also a fully developed statement of purpose, carved with lasers down to it's most essential elements.Try this. Take a pass through the song and ONLY listen to a single instrument. Or hell, just listen to the kick drum. Every beat is there for a reason. While moving or removing one wouldn't exactly ruin the song, it would change the equation in some way. It would alter the tone or shift the emplhasis. It's rare that you hear this much thought going into each an every beat of a single drum, even in programmed drums like these, which allow for endless editing and the the finest grade attention to detail. The temptation to loop it and leave it is just too great. And since the advent of unlimited multitracking it's seldom that you hear a band with such an unerring sense of where the listener's focus needs to be at each and every moment, of each and every song, for an entire album. Equally rare is their ability to then direct the listeners attention to the focal point and make it all sound so effortless. What more could you ask for?
Well, a little spontaneity wouldn't hurt. For years I've been searching for a band that was exactly like the XX, and now that I've heard them well, I love them, but they also gets me itching for something that's a little rougher around the edges. I makes me want to hear a band that hits record without asking what key the song is in. It makes me wonder what a recording of a guitar getting accidently unplugged halfway through a song would sound like. Maybe it would sound pretty cool, even if your weren't exactly sure why.
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