Jamie XX Creates a Groundbreaking Collage of Beats, Sounds and Songs on the Brilliant ‘In Waves’: Album Review

The challenge in talking about Jamie XX’s brilliant new album “In Waves” is trying to describe what “kind” of music it is. As the main songwriter and producer in the British trio the XX, he was the driving force behind one of the great hopes of alternative music in the late ‘00s. But as that group splintered, he began leaning into his other gig as a DJ and producer, and released the more beat-and-sample-based “In Colour” in 2015.

That album is great, but nearly nine years later, “In Waves” takes its template and turns it into something truly next level: It’s loaded with powerful beats and samples and basslines like a dance album, but unlike a lot of DJ-artists — who tend to focus on production — he comes at the music as much as a songwriter, with an ear toward melody and emotion as well as the dancefloor — and most fascinating of all is how he creates those melodies.

The album has three basic categories: the more-conventionally structured verse-chorus songs; the ones with vocal elements (usually samples or spoken-word recordings) crafted into new melodic shapes; and the mostly instrumental tracks, although there’s plenty of overlap.

The first category is led by “Life,” a collaboration with Swedish pop icon Robyn that fits neatly alongside her own visionary catalog, and an XX mini-reunion on “Waited All Night,” which has a gently percolating rhythm, low-key verses from Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, and and an indelible titular chorus.

But it’s in the second category that things get really innovative. Jamie has a rare ability to make memorable hooks out of melodically manipulated vocal bites, even wordless ones — on the above “Waited All Night,” he’s chopped someone’s voice into a sort of digital scat-singing; on the clubby “Baddy on the Floor,” it’s a rhythmic element out of “boom-de-baddy-boom-boom.”

Yet even that is relatively simple compared with the times he creates a whole new melody out of snippets or even full lines from other songs: In the gorgeous opener “Wanna,” you can find yourself trying to sing along with a soaring, spiralling wordless hook that’s impossible even to write phonetically (it’s something like “Ray-ah-oh-oh, ay-aoo-ooo-ha-ooo-ha-oo”);it’s apparently a mashup of elements from Double 99’s “Ripgroove” and Tina Moore’s “Never Gonna Let You Go.” On his collaboration with Australian sample wizards the Avalanches, they combine a spoken Nikki Giovanni passage with what sounds like a sped-up recording of female indigenous singers. And most immediately, on the first single “Treat Each Other Right,” he toggles lines from Almeta Lattimore’s 1975 song “Oh My Love” into several unforgettable hooks — I’ve been walking around for weeks singing “All we’ve got to do is TREEEEEAT each other right!” At the other end of the spectrum is “Breather,” a gently percolating track with a meditation-ish spoken-word section over it that actually feels therapeutic.

Most amusing of all is “F.U.,” one of the vinyl-only deluxe edition’s five bonus tracks. A clubby collaboration with Erykah Badu, it sounds like she freestyled at a wild party in the most literal sense of the term: shouting, talking, wailing and basically doing everything except conventional singing, and then Jamie had the time of his life chopping it up (and yes, the song’s titular expletive appears in hilarious form early in the song).

Those descriptions make it all seem dauntingly complex, but Jamie’s sense of songcraft and DJ skills ensure that the album flows smoothly (he’s been playing many of these songs in his DJ sets for the past couple of years). Yes, there are loads of propulsive rhythms and deeply dug samples and atmospheric sonics, and this album will rock a party. But best of all, “In Waves” is the kind of album that functions as foreground and background, lean-forward and lean-back, music you can think about or not.

And as you try to sing along with melodies created from multiple microseconds of voices and placed into totally different contexts from the ones in which they were created, you realize that it also toys brilliantly with the concept of what a song is and can be.