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Jamie XX Creates a Groundbreaking Collage of Beats, Sounds and Songs on the Brilliant ‘In Waves’: Album Review
On 'In Waves,' Jamie XX creates masterful collages of beats, samples and voices with an ear toward melody and emotion as well as the dancefloor.
The first category is led by “Life,” a collaboration with Swedish pop icon Robyn that fits neatly alongside her own visionary catalog, and an XX mini-reunion on “Waited All Night,” which has a gently percolating rhythm, low-key verses from Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, and and an indelible titular chorus. Jamie has a rare ability to make memorable hooks out of melodically manipulated vocal bites, even wordless ones — on the above “Waited All Night,” he’s chopped someone’s voice into a sort of digital scat-singing; on the clubby “Baddy on the Floor,” it’s a rhythmic element out of “boom-de-baddy-boom-boom.” Yet even that is relatively simple compared with the times he creates a whole new melody out of snippets or even full lines from other songs: In the gorgeous opener “Wanna,” you can find yourself trying to sing along with a soaring, spiralling wordless hook that’s impossible even to write phonetically (it’s something like “Ray-ah-oh-oh, ay-aoo-ooo-ha- ooo-ha-oo”);it’s apparently a mashup of elements from Double 99’s “Ripgroove” and Tina Moore’s “Never Gonna Let You Go.” On his collaboration with Australian sample wizards the Avalanches, they combine a spoken Nikki Giovanni passage with what sounds like a sped-up recording of female indigenous singers.
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