Not a Sarah McLachlan cover, for some reason…

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[6.30]

Anthony Easton: Well, this is fairly anemic, isn’t it?
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: Even for an outfit as fond of space as The xx, “Angels” is an especially sparse affair that tightropes between intimacy and heartbreak.  That is this trio’s strength, and they make a line like “being as in love with you as I am” sound like both a sweet whisper and a lonely diary scribble.  The guitars mostly stay out of the way and exist to magnify the sonic leg-room, which in turn emphasize the vocals.  The unsettling drums and details like the sound of seagulls hint at this being more about longing than actualized love (see also “a silent devotion”), but they also make spaciousness sound so inviting it’s tough to feel bummed out.    
[8]

Iain Mew: Bits of their first album can still make me stop whatever I’m doing for fear of disturbing the perfect stillness. This doesn’t change their sound much besides adding a nervous pitter-patter of drums, but makes it feel like an affront that the whole world doesn’t stop.
[9]

Brad Shoup: As ever with The xx, the listener has to bring so much to the table, there’s an automatic 18% gratuity.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The shivery atmospherics as usual are as bracing as a Hendrick’s and tonic after a day of drinking Heinekens. Free of context, however, and the thing dilutes.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: When I was first approached to write for the Singles Jukebox (hi, Dave!), I hesitated. It is still my official aesthetic position that every song is theoretically a [10] if understood through the right framework, and I worried that the constant churn of new music plus the silent peer pressure exercised by everyone else’s grading scale would encourage me to be less generous with my listening than I might otherwise be. All of which is prelude to saying that there are multiple frameworks through which to approach this song, and I can’t decide which I like best. One of the most attractive is that its slow, quiet patience is best understood as a counterweight against the prevailing winds in pop, which encourage loudness, speed, and flash; but to lean too hard on that argument is to use the xx as a stick to beat pop with, and I’m on record as being all in favor of loudness, speed and flash. Another framework is to take it on its own, without reference to any other music either “better” or “worse,” as a minorly dramatic composition, as a set of pretty sounds, as its own delicate structure. But this isn’t very satisfying, either — context-free thought is shallow thought. (It’s pretty compared to what? It’s delicate compared to what? How is it dramatic, and how does “minor” modify that?) But then there’s other contextual information I don’t have: I wasn’t paying attention to indie music in 2009, and their earlier music, if I heard it at all, has gone in one ear and out the other. I can’t place this on the great-to-forgettable spectrum of xx music, which I’m betting at least one commenter will claim means I don’t get to have an opinion. Even the fact that I’ve written this block of text is faintly ridiculous — the song is too slight, surely, to support this much rambling thought. All I have left is: Roma Madley Croft’s control, especially at that volume, is impressive, and the buried drum line rising and falling in the middle of is spectacular, if only because the rest of the song is so hushed around it.
[7]

Andy Hutchins: Shiny, happy music for holding your lover.
[6]

Alex Ostroff: This is a much more tentative start to a record than that of xx, which dispensed with words in favour of an epic instrumental build that led into wordless harmonized mumbling. The sudden drum rolls and isolated piano plink suggest that the mask has fallen slightly from The xx’s carefully composed faces; Romy’s yearning goes unresolved, lacking the natural counterpoint of Oliver’s less entrancing, but perfectly complementary vocals; and the “Be My Baby” reference in the timpanis momentarily pulls my thoughts away from her charismatic black hole voice to thoughts of Phil Spector. With “Angels,” the world of The xx no longer feels as hermetically sealed as it did the first time around, but make no mistake — these new rough edges are as meticulously calculated as anything else they’ve put to record. 
[8]

Will Adams: Woah, they’re reverberating like the Raveonettes! I do like guitars that glimmer at you like a green light across a bay, but the turgid lyrics and Romy Madley Croft’s enervating murmurs make the whole package astonishingly slight.
[4]

Colin Small: This fun development for a band known for its negative space, only filling the sound out just enough to show a difference from their first album. The song itself, however, is hardly a song. It’s an album trailer if anything.
[6]