Dear celebrity overlords, wherever you are, please let Taylor Swift date an xx guy. We need the breakup songs…

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Patrick St. Michel: The new wrinkle for the xx here (and on most of Coexist) is Jamie xx’s infatuation with house beats, giving a song like “Chained” an ever-so-slight dance feel. The rest of the track is typical xx: lots of space for Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim to sing at each other. On the album and as a single, it feels a bit too familiar following the floating beauty of “Angels.”
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: The musical equivalent of lying in bed staring at opposite walls: an xx song, then. The doll house beat is Jamie’s indulgence, the details there if you’re looking (Romy changing addressees, “did I hold too tight” to “did I hold him too tight”; the exasperated sigh of a cymbal). Every lousy pairing is lousy in its own way, after all; they take it right to the anticlimax.
[4]

Anthony Easton: Guilty, whispering, angst-ridden. When he says “if a feeling appears,” the threat is that no feelings will emerge, or will be allowed to emerge; then, the set of rhetorical questions about what is gone and what is missed just pile on the desperation.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Generating discreet tunelets is their game: puddles of sound in which the melancholy doesn’t get enough time to marinate. Just when I’ve had enough of “We used to get closer than this,” a New Order guitar solo interferes in the right way.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: The thing that makes it easy to fall in love with one xx song can also make it hard to love any other xx song: once you see the trick done, it no longer surprises.
[6]

Iain Mew: Songs by the xx are so reliant on a connection to their atmosphere for their power that they tend to go one of two possible ways, either stunning or barely noticeable. The guitar like “Intro” rushing to get somewhere is the former, the rest of “Chained” the latter.
[6]

Will Adams: It’s three minutes of mumbling over a lightly skipping beat. I really can’t see how I’m expected to respond with anything but glazed eyes and a gaping mouth.
[4]

Brad Shoup: Just let me focus on the drums. Maybe with enough time I can pretend a micro-house banger is coming to erase the profoundly uninteresting tone poem at hand. Jesus, everyone: sometimes relationships just end. And sometimes you can sing so quietly you might as well just think.
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