Jamie xx – In Colour

By far my favourite album from the UK. Full of love and memories.

The vinyl pressing is awful, chose instead the CD or numeric versions

I'm glad I'm not the only one with a bad pressing. This is a great album but the pressing is terrible. The surface noise takes away a huge amount. One of the posts mentions the deluxe version being better so I will try and get a copy of that as the standard version is really bad. I'd like to pretend that it gives it an extra quality but it really doesn't, it just distracts from what are some really great tracks. Such a shame.

Jamie xx makes his proper solo debut with "In Colour", an emotive, impressionist painting of a hazy rave scene and an expired love affair born within it. Pitchfork highly praised it for its originality, and Resident Advisor heavily criticized it for exactly the opposite. But ultimately the album sits at a crossroads between both, by using old ideas to create something new; using the sounds of rave history as a way to tell a story.

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The album begins with "Gosh", a track that immediately makes the rave influence apparent, and halfway through becomes surprisingly uplifting. It's a gratifying opener. "Sleep Sound" is a familiar sound for Jamie, and one of the album's highlights.

"SeeSaw" provides a nice break in energy, and also introduces the smallest of the three emotional vignettes that Romy & Oliver provide. "Obvs" is a very nice track, and it's definitely divided; half of the track wants to go in a direction opposite the other. This possibly gives it less replay-potential than a lot of the other tracks on the album, but it fits really well when in its proper context.

"Just Saying" is a brief, but very unique, ambient interlude. Following that is "Stranger in a Room", a beautiful ballad sung by Oliver Sim. After the spacey interlude preceding it, the isolation of Oliver's vocals over nothing but a soft, arpeggiated synth blip and a classic xx-style guitar line is the perfect pairing for his lyrics, which imply losing your own identity in a crowd (in this case a club or rave) to feel the feigned intimacy of connecting with someone else's outline.

After 4-and-a-half minutes of beatless ambience, the almost 2 minute long buildup in "Hold Tight" feels like a tease. However instead of a high energy drop and a release in energy, the listener is rewarded with the opposite. The drums end up being only another element in the track's long, progressive crescendo of energy. The deeper into the track you get, the stronger the pull becomes – just like losing yourself to the scene.

"Loud Places" is one of the album's strongest tracks. Romy's lyrics are plain, but beautiful. While also illustrating the irony in looking for intimacy in a crowded place, she reveals that she's been hurt by someone who didn't fall for the same trap she did. He's moved on from her, still unable to move past the motives he had when they first met; she can't come to with the fact that she wasn't enough. The music behind her voice is primarily an excerpt from the chorus of Idris Muhammad's 1977 jazz-funk-disco masterpiece, "Could Heaven Ever Be Like This". The song's lyrics are devotional; the subject of the singer's affection has taken them to heights they've never reached before. During the chorus after Romy's first verse, her words are slowly drowned out by the Idris Muhammad sample fading in. It's a very beautiful moment – just after she reveals that she's lost the person she loves, her feelings are drowned out by a song about feeling music in your lover's eyes.

"I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" boasts a creative Persuasions sample, verses from Young Thug, and a bouncy, summery, and original backing beat. As fun as the track is on its own, it feels very out of place on this album, lacking any of the themes that the other 10 tracks capture so well. The album feels much more cohesive with this track omitted (when I listen to the album as a whole unit, I tend to skip this track entirely). It made a great addition to my summer playlists, however.

"The Rest is Noise" is a wonderful climax, tying together the whole rest of the project very nicely. I also loved that Jamie managed to make such emotive music out of a police siren. The album ends with "Girl", one of Jamie's finest tracks, and probably his most creative use of sampling. The bass line, the washes of sound, and the sampled vocals are all very satisfyingly arranged. The track suggests the feeling of being attracted to a beautiful woman, and the vocal snippet at the very beginning fits all too well as an introduction. Instead of fading out, the song ends very abruptly.

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Jamie did something very unique and original with his debut. Although his rave influences are very obvious, as are some of his sample choices (the Muhammad song sampled in "Loud Places" was just sampled by Chrome Sparks 2 years ago), he still paints a very beautiful picture with it all.

I do wish he replaced "Good Times" with something else, however; if he switched it out for the instrumental version, or even the instrumental version of his last non-album single "All Under One Roof Raving," it would have fit much more organically within the album. A track like Good Times begs to be released as a bonus track or a single.

Even with the track in its intended place, "In Colour" is a very original album. And in an era rich with social overload, the loss of originality, and the rehashing of old ideas, it's also a very relevant one.

7½ out of 10

why did this receive such split love/hate reviews? this is gold

No wonder it came with a free CD, the sound on the vinyl is terrible. Listened to the CD on the way home and bass from Gosh went through me, but it's hardly noticeable on the vinyl. I agree with other posters, the second side it better quality. I'm going to the record company.

Mine sounds like shit... either static, artifacts from the pressing, or a plain bad press. I'll give mine a proper wash over the weekend to see if that improves things.