Veröffentlicht
Sep 20, 2024Veröffentlicht
September 2024
- Cloying hooks detract from skilled production on the artist's second album, which takes more from club culture than it gives back.
- Perhaps the most pressing question in evaluating Jamie xx's second album, In Waves, is: who is it for? As with his 2015 debut In Colour, the new record intends to honour a spate of the artist's favourite musical genres, blending and repackaging them for the dance floor. Yet there are many kinds of dance floors, and the album's success hinges on which ones Jamie xx—undeniably talented, if at times misguided—expects it to impress.
The London producer, AKA Jamie Smith, has spent his entire adult life in music's upper echelons, playing to massive crowds on endless tours. He broke in as one-third of indie-defining act The xx, and went on to produce for Drake, Alicia Keys and Frank Ocean while releasing an array of long, patient remixes. In 2015, he nabbed GRAMMY and Mercury Prize nominations for In Colour, a collage of ballads, electronic riffs and radio-ready collaborations layered with vestiges of early rave culture. Rated just shy of perfect by Pitchfork, it was rinsed at festivals and house parties—but less so in the clubs that inspired it.
Speaking to Vulture this August about In Colour's negative reviews (such as Andrew Ryce's for RA, which described the album as "dance music–lite," whose nostalgia "dissolves on contact"), Smith mentioned struggling with feeling like his work contributed to the mainstreaming of underground music. Yet, if he has regrets, you won't hear them on In Waves, which goes even further in rendering historic club tropes palatable to the mostly straight, affluent audiences who throng his sets—which, besides occasional appearances at Printworks or Panorama Bar, mostly occur at places like Coachella and the Hollywood Bowl.
Accordingly, Smith seems to feel responsible for exposing his followers to real club culture, rather than the watered-down version his success helped foster. He recently organised The Floor, a series of 20 intimate pop-up nights across London, Brooklyn and Los Angeles, supported by acts from Four Tet to BAMBII, to offer his audience an alternative to corporate clubbing. But that possibility already exists: Four Tet delights in playing homegrown venues like Nowadays, while In Waves collaborator Honey Dijon has a Panorama Bar residency.
Creating a simulacrum of a club instead of just playing at, you know, a good club, feels indicative of Smith's dilemma: he can't find a way back into the very culture that created him. This tragedy, and its lack of resolution, defines the saccharine and overdone sound of In Waves, whose missing of the mark is evident from its earliest moments.
Opening track "Wanna" conjures the sort of textured hypnosis that Smith's work achieves at its finest. Yet it spits the listener out into "Treat Each Other Right," whose eponymous chipmunk hook (sampled from soul singer Almeta Lattimore's 1975 song "Oh My Love") is layered over rumbling UK garage kicks. The "love each other" message mimics didactic, old-school Chicago house—yet while those tracks earned their sermons by unfolding slowly, Smith's version arrives early and shoves the words down your throat in a four-minute frenzy, making its pithy sentiment all the more trite. Needless haste also kills "Waited All Night," whose heartfelt verses from Smith's xx bandmates are crammed into two minutes; blink and you'll miss this otherwise cosy reunion.
Smith surely knows that queer people define the club, but his attempt to reach a world he doesn't actively participate in results in the album's greatest flop. On "Life," Swedish singer Robyn, patron saint of the gays, delivers pop pizzazz over a jubilant sample from disco legend Cerrone. But queer slang like "giving me life, get it, make 'em gag" sounds so contrived—dated, even—that it will only inspire cringe in the very spaces Cerrone's music helped define. On his collaboration with Honey Dijon, "Baddy On The Floor," however, the Chicago producer's jacking sensibilities help the track succeed tremendously, with triumphant horns that will blare at all kinds of parties.
The LP's best moments come when Smith shelves the cheesy lyrics and overblown instrumentation to let his masterful use of sampling shine. Over a simple house beat, the stammering cries on "Still Summer" shimmer like a mid-September sunset, wordless yet full of feeling; catchy, but not cloying. His knack for spinning vocals into clean, dreamy beats imparts a similar sincerity to "The Feeling I Get From You," which evokes the lusty contentment of a new romance. At six minutes long, "Breather" reminds us of Smith's exceptional skill with slow burns. A wobbly bassline wails under insistent stabs and breaks to deliver something edgy yet smooth—but the mindfulness meditation inserted into the ominous, sexy background feels entirely out of place.
As on past releases, Smith is self-aware to the point of parody. He told Vulture that this album's feel-good samples, inspired by his pandemic-era soul-searching, are meant to be both "fun and poking fun." Yet such post-ironic dodging belongs to a bygone hipster era and detracts from the album's successes. With stellar contributions from Kelsey Lu and rising Hackney rapper John Glacier, "Dafodil" throbs like good MDMA and you can almost hear the sampled J.J. Barnes' track, "I Just Make Believe (I'm Touching You)," curling like smoke from vintage stereo speakers. But the outro (a stoner voice half-joking that the secret to life is, again, to love each other) kills the vibe of an otherwise fine experiment.
At other times, Smith's sampling can feel almost negligent, such as on the 2022 single "Kill Dem" (set to be included on the album's deluxe edition), which makes something light and euphoric out of a widely sampled reggae song accused of calling for homophobic violence. The maximalist urge to cram in every possible genre, from soul and funk to hip-hop and UK garage, results in an indiscriminate pastiche where meanings aren't reimagined, but lost. Even more opaque is what the artist is trying to say himself; appropriately, he launched this latest era of his sound with a 2020 single titled "Idontknow."
If anything can redeem In Waves, it would be a remix album with extended cuts. Fans who attended The Floor heard Smith's new material stretched over long durations; in Brooklyn, he looped Cerrone's horns for the first four minutes of "Life," elongating the use of Robyn's vocals and making them less grating. "Gather Round Children," a standout from the album, sounded even better when played out in 2022, with the blissful sample of children's voices delighting by surprise. Smith's DJ sets are beloved, yet his album's short tracks with scattered asides aren't useful to other DJs—they don't mix well, nor lend themselves to steady grooves. Even if they are intended for the club, it's certainly not the club where you'd hear recent output by producers who keep the rave scene alive.
During lockdown, Smith visited illegal raves on London's River Thames. He was inspired, but found the music "mostly terrible." This admission to Rolling Stone UK unlocks the supposed tension of In Waves: focusing on the past, it's unbeholden to the wild multiplicity of today's dance scene, which isn't just booming in "corporate" clubs. The LP eschews contributing to soul or house music culture in favour of reconfiguring it for festival stages. And if, as the liner notes suggest, it's designed to evoke the rolling waves of an "almost mystical night out," it's not those surfed by veteran ravers, but the fleeting occupants of his pop-up clubs.
Tracklist01. Wanna
02. Treat Each Other Right
03. Waited All Night feat. Romy and Oliver Sim
04. Baddy on the Floor feat. Honey Dijon
05. Dafodil feat. Kelsey Lu, John Glacier and Panda Bear
06. Still Summer
07. Life feat. Robyn
08. The Feeling I Get from You
09. Breather
10. All You Children feat. The Avalanches
11. Every Single Weekend
12. Falling Together