Jamie xx played Roadrunner – 1/31
The U.K. producer returned for his first Boston solo show in nearly a decade last Friday at Roadrunner.
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We really didn’t know how good we had it in 2015.
That was the year that Jamie xx – the DJ/producer whose airy soundscapes form the backbone of The xx’s moody electro-pop – made his solo breakthrough with the vibrant and infinitely-replayable In Colour, and also a sort of cutoff year before a lot of bad stuff began to go down, generally-speaking. I have a distinct memory of xx’s set at that year’s Pitchfork Music Festival wherein he let the entirely of The Persuasions’ “Good Times” spin out before dropping his own Young Thug-featuring flip of the track, to the delight of a deep crowd in the Chicago summer sun. Ten years on, Pitchfork Fest has undergone gutting and unceremonious cancellation at the hands of its corporate overlords, Thug only recently made it out of a years-long RICO prosecution that sought to use his music as evidence, and there’s an even-worse echo of the harrowing political landscape we’d descend into not long after that summer in the air. There isn’t a literal connection between any of this, but a decade later, it all causes one to ponder.
Point being, Jamie xx closed out last weekend’s show at Roadrunner with that same song – arguably the most joyous, euphoric production of his career to date – and it hit a little different.
Friday’s show had a theme to express, one addressed directly in the features and spoken interludes of cuts from xx’s 2024 In Colour followup In Waves and visualized by a massive LED wall at the rear of the stage that reflected the audience back on itself: the dancefloor as a source of community, power and uplift. It had not been a very uplifting January for many Americans, nor for artists presently touring here from abroad I imagine, but everyone from the top to bottom of a packed Roadrunner came for some escape, which the man of the hour was happy to deliver.
Threading material from both of his solo records together with the unpredictable remixes and needledrops of a more traditional DJ set, xx kept the mood ecstatic over the course of a nearly two-hour show. And in the spirit of a true club night, there was hardly any focus on the artist himself. Multicolored beams occasionally criss-crossed or backlit the rig on stage, but mostly illuminated the crowd and – eventually – a jumbo-sized mirror ball overhead. Even his intro was understated, a seamless and fanfare-free handoff from opening DJ Villager straight into the main event. xx was less a performer than an architect of some sorely-needed vibes. For the night at least, he succeeded in making the prospect of good times a little less distant.
Scroll for some photos from the set below.
