The sampler is a memory machine. This is true in both the literal sense—memory is one of the device’s key specs, measuring how much sonic information it can hold in its “mind” at once—but also as a metaphor. When you capture and play back a sound, transposing it to a new context, you are “playing” the memories that have attached themselves to the original piece of music as much as you are playing a particular piece of sound. The producer Jamie Smith, better known to the world as Jamie xx, is a sampling artist and a memory artist. He does things with the music he’s absorbed and with the associations that are embedded within it. So when we listen to his music, we aren’t just listening to music played by people in a room. We’re listening to his listening and hearing his hearing; he senses memories in certain sounds—some of which he was there to experience the first time, some of which have been handed down to him—and transforms them into something new and personal.
In Colour, Jamie xx’s full-length solo debut, has been a rumor for a few years now. In 2011, he followed his remix collaboration with Gil Scott-Heron, We’re New Here, with his debut single, “Far Nearer.” It was strikingly different from his work with the xx and, hearing it, it was possible to triangulate and imagine the broader and more varied sensibility that served as an umbrella over both. The emergence of Jamie xx as a producer’s voice is part of what made the xx’s follow-up, Coexist, disappointing. It’s a decent record, but once we had a better sense of Jamie xx’s range, it was hard to square that knowledge with the narrow aesthetic parameters of his main band, lovely as their music could be. All along, this one was coming together. One of the great things about him is he works slow and gets everything just so, treating each project as the one chance to get it right. In Colour gets there: It’s the dazzling culmination of Jamie xx’s last six years of work, gathering up elements of everything he’s done—moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists—and packing them tightly into a glittering ball that reflects spinning fragments of feeling back at us.
A key idea embedded in the notion of rave is it had something for everyone. Though rave was at one point very fashionable, it was also, early on and at its best, egalitarian. The platonic ideal of the dancefloor, which is obviously never quite fulfilled, is that the dancers meet as equals. Everyone is on their own journey and there is no judgement, and the right drugs at the right time have helped to bring this starry-eyed vision to life. Jamie xx’s music captures some of this spirit by being terribly hip and of-the-moment but also deeply emotional. It’s “cool” music designed to make you feel, and the mechanism is vulnerability.
There are passages on In Colour where the music is huge and anthemic while being simultaneously open and intimate. Opening track “Gosh” is the table-setter. It builds, one loop upon the next, each new brick of groove slotting into place, until it becomes a sky-scraping edifice whose call-to-motion is impossible to resist. And then, just as the last tightly-bound fixture is put into place, there comes a squelchy, slightly awkward synthesizer solo that sounds like it was knocked off in one hurried take by someone who approaches the instrument with the excitement of a newcomer. When the keyboard falls in, which is still exciting and surprising after many dozens of plays, it’s as if our tower of sound is suddenly crowned by a massive cluster of balloons that lifts it into the sky, Up style.
The view from this vantage point never flags. “Sleep Sound” takes a sample of the Four Freshmen’s “It’s a Blue World” and gently cuts it into pieces, the voice tumbling through time in a manner not unlike what the Field’s Axel Willner did to the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You,” but the whole thing is filtered and submerged, a dream of water that’s soothing even as it hints of drowning. “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” features rapper Young Thug and dancehall vocalist Popcaan and while the combination of the three was iffy on paper, they wind up clicking. Thug is bursting with joy as he delivers profane couplets in his sing-song cadence, and Popcaan grounds the music and forms a bridge to the ragga of Jamie xx’s jungle heroes. As the album moves on, Jamie xx moves through styles and textures, everything unified by his highly attuned ear.
Three tunes find Jamie xx collaborating with his bandmates, and, like “Good Times,” they show how well he straddles the line between “song” and “track.” “Stranger in a Room,” featuring Oliver Sim, could be a (very good) xx song and is the only thing here that seems like it could have come from the band. Romy’s melody on “SeeSaw” is all hushed confession mixed with longing, but instead of spare guitar and drums, Jamie xx surrounds it with breakbeats and a pulsing synth that suggests the cosmos, merging the closest possible feelings with the vastness of the infinite. “Loud Places,” making brilliant use of a sample of jazz drummer Idris Muhammad’s “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This,” is a song of contrast in the manner of “SeeSaw.” But the sample on “Loud Places” is warmer and more inclusive, and it’s followed by a brilliantly simple lyric about club-going loneliness and desire that might make Morrissey jealous: “I go to loud places/To search for someone/To be quiet with.”
That clash of feeling, of being overwhelmed by everything at once while also wanting to zoom in on and live inside the tiniest detail, is the animating force of In Colour. Late in the album, the rush comes to a head on “The Rest Is Noise,” a track that functions as the flipside to “Gosh,” the party turned inside out, as shouting abandon gives way to a huge wash of yearning. There’s even a small nod to “Gosh”’s synth break as the album seems to return from where it started. It makes me think of a comment from Jamie xx regarding one of the record’s most modest tracks, “Obvs,” which is is driven by a steel drum lead. Jamie xx is fascinated by the instrument and has returned to it regularly, describing its appeal like this: “You can make it sound quite melancholy… but at the same time, it reminds me of paradise.” It’s not a bad description of how In Colour works. It’s the album as raucous party where the thrill of the moment never quite obliterates the wistful sadness that comes from knowing it will all end too soon.
