『In Colour』 – Jamie xx (2015)

Relentless Light

ラフィ・マーサー

Every collection has its surprises — the records that sneak in not because of lineage or gravitas but because of sheer compulsion. Jamie xx’s In Colour, released in 2015, is one of mine. I love this album. I love its tune, its pulse, its relentlessness. It is not the record I was expected to keep on the shelf, yet here it is, stubborn and luminous, playing louder than most, demanding movement.

Jamie xx, born Jamie Smith, emerged as the producer behind The xx, the band that brought hushed intimacy to indie pop. But In Colour was his first true statement as a solo artist. Where The xx specialised in restraint, Jamie opened the doors wide, flooding the room with colour, rhythm, volume. The surprise is not that it works, but how completely it refuses to retreat: this is music with drive, with propulsion, with a forward tilt that never lets up.

The album opens with Gosh, a track that sets the relentless tone. A looping vocal sample repeats like mantra, drums pushing with steady insistence, bass rolling like a low tide that refuses to recede. It is not aggressive, but it is unstoppable, a track that feels like machinery in motion — gleaming, efficient, hypnotic. Already, the unexpectedness is there: a producer known for quiet suddenly creating something massive.

From there, Sleep Sound drifts into subtler territory, but still the pulse continues, insistent beneath the haze. Seesaw, with Romy Madley Croft on vocals, introduces melancholy, yet the beat still drives forward, relentless beneath the fragility. Obvs toys with steel drum melodies, tropical light refracted into electronica, yet even here, rhythm never relaxes. The record insists on momentum, each track carrying into the next with a sense of inevitability.

Loud Places, featuring Romy again, is perhaps the emotional heart of the album. It begins intimate, her voice tender, before swelling into a chorus built on crowd samples, as if the solitary song has suddenly become communal. It is a moment of release, a reminder that dance music is not just about individual experience but about collective catharsis. Good Times, with Young Thug and Popcaan, breaks the mood with outright hedonism — the record’s most extroverted cut, yet still woven into the overall texture.

What makes In Colour remarkable is the tension between melancholy and propulsion. Jamie xx laces his tracks with nostalgia — fragments of old rave samples, echoes of 90s UK club culture, melancholy melodies that feel borrowed from memory. Yet against this wistfulness sits rhythm that never stops, a relentless pulse that carries the listener forward. It is music that acknowledges loss yet refuses stasis.

In the listening bar, this relentlessness takes on physical form. The bassline in Gosh rattles the room, cymbal patterns shimmer across the speakers, vocal fragments cut through like shards of light. It is not background. It insists on presence, insists on bodies responding. Listeners find themselves nodding, swaying, caught in its inevitability. It may be a guilty pleasure — glossy, fashionable, of its moment — but it is also undeniable.

Culturally, In Colour marked the arrival of a new kind of electronic auteur. Jamie xx was not a DJ in the traditional sense, nor a pop star, nor a producer hiding in the shadows. He occupied all those spaces at once. The record pulled UK club culture into the mainstream without dilution, reminding wider audiences of rave’s emotional depth as well as its physical power. It was both homage and evolution, rooted in history yet moving relentlessly forward.

To return to In Colour now is to be reminded that not every record in the collection has to whisper. Some are there to push, to flood, to insist. The guilty-pleasure tag fits only because it feels too obvious, too fashionable, too modern to sit alongside the hushed reverence of Sade or the atmospheric shimmer of Fennesz. And yet, when I reach for it, I never regret it. I love the tune. I love the relentlessness. I love the way it takes over the room, unexpected every time.

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