XI (pronounced like xylophone without the lophone and spelt Big X little i)) are STALWART. That is to say: they are strong, and sturdy, robust, solid, dependable, and courageous. Resolute and firm. Etymologically speaking: worthy of support. For once the dictionary confirmed my first choice of adjective in a scarily precise way. (thanks Mr Collins) All those other words are bang on too. Stalwart - check it for yourself.
XI's music is dramatic, heart-bursting stuff. Darren Worth’s vocals are clarion, open throated blasts of masculine emotion in full flood. We've told you about the last couple of singles, I’m sure.
The Glow of Television (amazingly. given the more than a couple of years they have been playing venues all over Britain) is actually XI's first full album on general release. Their repertoire has been shedding layers over the years, like some kind of perfectionist snake waiting for a full set of gleaming scales before shimmying into the full spotlight glare. Demos have been circulated, singles have been released and tours have been completed. But now they seem to be going for broke with eleven (spelt big X, big I) impregnable tracks that have been honed and polished. "The Glow of Television" defines what Xi have become.
Take them or leave them. Daz's heroically bright singing, Doink's killer-craftsman drumming, Bill's precision tooled bass playing, Legge’s geologically large keyboard backdrops and Flimsy John's wailing guitars have absolutely no close comparison. The production and mixing on this recording blend them very successfully into a singular sum of equal parts.
The word progressive (with its original 70s associations) would be a good start in imagining the sound. What I mean to say by that is that there are genuine songs here, like closing track "I'm Trying" and there are instrumental pyrotechnics like "Faceless" that blast you out of your seat and poke your "wooo!" and "How did they do that" sensors. And every track invents, tests, or does something fresh that gives a listener reasons to come back, be surprised and be delighted. Every song comes with a new take on the basic formats, a new rearrangement of the sonic spaces within which the big songs get powered through.
Opening tune "Silence" is a funky headbanging airpunching tune. "Montauk", released last year as a single, is a swirling evocation of King Crimson doing a Bowie song. "Faceless" has a grandiosity that drives a great big Harley along some thatchered mill town back streets.
"Mantre" comes in like a Tom Waits rags-and-bones shuffle and builds into something with a funky sway to it before heading off in Big Guitar sweeps and multitracked apocalyptic vocal tracks. It’s a new song and fully vindicates their policy of "no new tunes till they’re better than the old ones". It’s my personal favourite, with its echoing desert spaces contrasting with the full electric storm of the main sections. "TV Movie" has a low-key melodic entry and another big fat chunk of emotional indulgence that smacks a fairly heavy rock fist into the bantamweight squealings of pop emo.
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"My Dear" turns another texture-shift. It has a sharp back beat that would get bikers up and dancing around like school girls. (but with heavy headshakey bits to save their blushes)."Under My Feet" has a frantic math-rock fussiness in among pile-driving chord crunching sections. Maybe the least coherent track on the CD, but no slouch, not at all. "Low" is a more familiar number, with a vicious guitar entry and plenty of bombast. The main tune is quite love-lorn desperation – but with adequate male rage to hold back the tears and derision. The 5 minutes 52 seconds of closing track "I'm Trying" do what a finale should do. The song covers all the themes and temperatures of the album as a whole – all its virtues are crammed into one epic journey from quiet opening to volcanic finish.
So how is this courageous? Well, in audience and critical attention stakes, it's perilously no-fashion music. There are genre-anxious folk out there who will run a mile from this stuff. It's too direct, too self-knowing and somehow too luxuriously, indulgently hedonistic for frail folk. It's wholemeal rock with crunchy bits and squidgy bits but an almost complete avoidance of the standard cliché tricks and turns that kept Donnington fields thigh deep in stoner oblivion over the years. It has indie songs about love and stuff, yes. But they will scare the living daylights out of the fringe kids with their granite strength the lunging power of their upward gear changes.
In other words: riffs rule, but hearts beat strong enough to make it all matter.
And, in case you were worried about the sawn-off xylophone thing Xi (Ξ, or ζ) is the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. Mathematicians sometimes use it to denote a random variable (good choice!) and may pedantically insist on pronouncing it "k’sai" because that’s how Greeks pronounce it these days.
www.xi-uk.com
www.myspace.com/xiband
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