Co-exist by The xx [REVIEW]

The weight of breathlessness held in the xx’s Mercury Prize winning debut drew comparisons by me to black holes in an exuberant ill-understanding of quantum-physics. So I had set, to be fair, perhaps unreasonably high expectations for their sophomore. Luckily, though, they took those expectations and exploded them. If the maxim ‘less is more’ is held to be true, then Co-exist is veritably overgrown with sparsity; it is a lush, prodigious rain-forest of tenuity.

And like the name might suggest the vocals and song’s of Romy Madley-Croft and Oliver Sim never quite meet as a duet; instead, they sit along side of each-other, symbiotic rather than parasitic. They echo one another like two narratives recounting shared stories from ever-so-slightly different perspectives. The effect is mesmerizing, captivating and, frankly, difficult to stop listening to.

FREAKIN’ AWESOME

Cheese on Toast is phasing in a new album ratings system. I have always struggled with a numerical scale; it feels so finite and arbitrary. So the new scale looks like this :
FREAKIN’ AWESOME / JUST AWESOME / REALLY GREAT / GREAT / GOOD  / PRETTY COOL / NOT BAD / COULD BE BETTER / PRETTY BAD, ACTUALLY / NOT RECOMMENDED FOR EARS