Falling Together

Jamie Xx has been drip feeding new songs into the ether for the last four years and finally last month pulled it all together with a new album, In Waves. Baddy On The Floor with Honey Dijon, Treat Each Other Right, Life and All You Children (written and produced with The Avalanches) all preceded it, and a couple of others that have already seen the light of day have been included on a deluxe edition of In Waves- Let's Do It Again and Kill Dem. You might think that this has diluted the album, so much of it being already available. If anything it's done the opposite. In Waves has both familiar and new songs that work perfectly alongside each other and although most of the tracks seem tailor made for dancing, for being played through huge speakers in dark rooms after midnight, it works as an album, sequenced and executed adeptly. In Waves has bangers, exuberant party tunes and massive highs, but also moments of reflection and some highly charged, emotive moments of beauty. It really is very good indeed.

In Waves is packed with guests. Jamie's bandmates from The Xx turn up on the album's most melancholic song, Waited All Night. Pop star Robyn songs on Life. Panda Bear and Kelsey Lu contribute to Dafodil. Single of the summer All You Children is a giddy,  endlessly effervescent Avalanches sample fest. Jamie's production is superb, the peaks are high, the rhythms are endlessly danceable and the sounds are, in contrast to the monochrome sleeve, brightly coloured and lit up. The opening pair of Wanna and Treat Each Other Right both sound like they could have been taken straight from pirate radio. Jamie's production skills are legendary and the songs are testament to hours in the studio but at the same time, nothing sounds overworked. 

The run of tracks on side two building to the end is exhilarating, songs about the pleasures of dancing and dance music, filleting various sounds from the last three and a half decades but adding something that is completely contemporary too, completely 2024. Breather is one of the tracks without guests, a techno/ machine- made first half with a robotic female voice telling us to let go, that we deserve to be happy, to 'just surrender... erase all the worries... nothing exists... breath in and let go'. Then at three minutes forty the second half of the tune kicks in, there's a sudden shift in tempo and tone, the synths become wiggier, the drums tougher, the topline more intense, everything building in waves (yep), euphoric and strobe lit. 

Then there's All You Children which is headspinningly brilliant, more fun and more bounce than almost anything else released this year, and a one minute interlude called Every Single Weekend. and then we're into the closer, Falling Together- rapid, rattling 808 drums and the voice of Oona Doherty, whispering about the dancer, a single dot, surrounded by darkness, the tininess of the world and all the people on it, the sheer cosmic insignificance of us all. The synth chords rise and rise, pushing some emotional button that could easily tip you over that fine line between ecstasy and tears. 'Look again at that dancer', she says, 'What. The fuck? That's it. That's all there is. Us. The lonely speck in the great cosmic dark'. 

'Let go, let go, the great let go, look again at that dancer, that's you, that's us...'  

Somehow, the combination of Jamie's effortlessly brilliant music, always ascending and enveloping, and Oona's words, make this sound not just inspiring but beautiful too, profound even. The world's on fire. The planet's doomed. What to do? Dance in the face of it all, all of us, together.