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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC RECORD REVIEWS

Essential New Music: Jamie xx’s “In Colour”

Jamiexx

Better known to his mother as Jamie Smith, Jamie xx is essentially the one-man backline for London beat alchemists and modern Portishead inheritors the xx, a crate-digging omnivore and increasingly among the most in-demand remixers of his generation (Adele, Alicia Keys, plus the list essayed in the sidebar, among others).

In parallel with that of his South London band—the school they all attended is featured in rom-com Love, Actually—is a career that has blossomed over the course of various tracks Jamie has not only repurposed for others, but has now fashioned as an emerging solo artist. In Colour finds him joined by xx mates Romy Madley Croft (the unsurprisingly xx-like and sealegs-inducing “Seesaw” and “Loud Places”) and Oliver Sim (“Stranger In A Room,” with circular synth programs that find the pair stretching their signature sound into trance-meets-Doors terrain), as well as artists such as Young Thug (“I Know There’s Gonna Be Good Times”) and Four Tet.

But underneath it all is a specificity of sound that threads all of the album’s tracks together like beads on a string, a Caribbean steel-drums-informed throughline that marks the entire affair as the creation of a single artist—someone making a lot out of a little, turning seemingly random squiggles and samples (as heard on the shivery “Girl” and spasmodic “The Rest Is Noise”) into something far more than the sum of their very contemporary-sounding parts. Look out for a Madonna white-label on a dance floor near you, stat.

—Corey duBrowa