Zoom-in Online

This blog post was contributed by Max Willens, ZIO's Music Channel Assistant.

Welcome to the latest installment of ZIO's newest weekly series, Late to the Party, in which we catch you up on what everybody - from staff writers at the top outlets to the bloggers hiding in their mothers' basements - has been saying about a rising artist.

This week's subject: the hushed, quietly sexual London quartet the xx, whose self-titled debut album was released in America last week.

There are few things more toxic than hype.

It inflates expectations. It turns early adopters into venomous naysayers. It pollutes creative dynamics. At its absolute worst, it sometimes seems to have the power to warp our ears, to turn what we first hear into something else altogether.

This sometimes results in what The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones has called "communal hallucinations" about how good or bad a band really is. Hype declared Black Kids the new kings of rock 'n' roll before they knew how to play live. It also gushed about the transcendent power of Animal Collective's recent live tours, that "moment of convulsive beauty people want to experience together," Frere-Jones  recently wrote on his blog, "even if it’s not really there."

And if there's one band that knows about hype this year, it's the xx. The British quartet is barely a year old, but they are up to their necks in rapturous praise already. Drowned in Sound declared their debut, xx, to be "almost perfect"; NME called it "one of 2009's most unique debuts,"; Coke Machine Glow wrote, uh, "it returns us, full circle, to a dialectic protruding into context: maybe this speaks to a confusion between what’s critically clear and what’s theoretically abstract, what’s 'night music' and what isn’t, what we listen to and how and where we listen to it." Which is positive. We think. (They gave it an 86)

And while the xx is clearly a lot of things to a lot of people, their supporters all fixate on the same two things. The first is the songwriting of the band's dual vocalists, Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft. Sim and Madley Croft have known each other since they were toddlers, and their duets are balancing acts, both evocative and open-ended, sexual and hesitant: "Maybe I had said / Something that was wrong / Can I make it better / With the lights turned on," goes one particularly charged chorus.

The second deals with what isn't there. xx's music is hushed, minimal and steady, with clean, simple guitar lines shaping beguiling negative spaces, and everything, right down to the tones of each note, sounds carefully considered. Critics have projected a great deal onto these black gaps, from dubstep's bleak, weighty echo to the Young Marble Giants' slender New Wave minimalism, and in most cases, these comparisons make a kind of sense. 

But somewhere along the line, a strange idea began cropping up in print and online: the xx, said one writer after another, were heavily influenced by r&b.

Despite absolutely no readily apparent rhythmic, melodic, or vocal influence, the idea took off. Their Myspace profile, which cited Aaliyah, Missy Elliott, Ginuwine, and Justin Timberlake as influences alongside more expected artists like the Cure and the Pixies, might've biased some bloggers. And some disproportionately praised covers of Aaliyah and Womack & Womack songs certainly helped the idea along.

But eventually, critics started listening for it, and the effect was not positive. Some writers went completely off the deep end, claiming "significant stylistic cues from the futuristic zoom-bip of Swizz Beatz and Timbaland and the militaristic synth production of the Neptunes." Others got so frustrated by the suggestion that they actually penalized the band for it. The New York Times called the Aaliyah cover "fealty [that] can create its own kind of insult," and derided Sim and Madley Croft's duets as "parody", the implication being that the xx's hushed nocturnal whispers were somehow meant to fit within the same tradition as Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross singing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"; they'd have been better off comparing Sim and Madley Croft to Low's Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker.

xx is that rarest of records that is probably worthy of most of its acclaim. But it is also a fantastic example of how hype can distort and pollute not only a critic's ears but also confuse an audience about what it's listening to. To date, Pitchfork's the only outlet to highlight any kind of specific influence that r&b might have had on xx, and it's really more of a production choice than a musical feature. If this promising young band wants to avoid getting swallowed up before they make their second album, they'd do well to keep their mouths shut about what they're listening to.