I wish bands would stop resorting to using “X” in their name. For me it all started with X in the 70′s. My friends and I were all busy cutting ourselves, wearing second-hand clothes, getting weird haircuts, and listening to weird music, when all of the sudden people started calling us “Punk”. It wasn’t long after that that there were all these “punk bands” running around, acting all punk and stuff. One of the first in the states was, of course, “X”. In spite of (or maybe because of?) their solid musicianship, I remember distinctly thinking they sucked, and seemed incredibly contrived. Punk Lifestyle Rule Number 1: You can’t call yourself punk and actually be punk at the same time. It’s sort of like Groucho’s line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have people like him as a member. I mean c’mon, these alleged rebel misfits actually received an “Official Certificate of Recognition” from the City of Los Angeles for their music. We also would always confuse X with Generation X, until Billy Idol left the band and started his solo career. Which has turned out well, don’t you think? In my opinion, the only bands named X ever worth listening to were the esoteric and now impossible-to-find Tom Cora and the Ex, and the even more obscure Brand X. That is, until I put on a copy of XX’s new release, cleverly named (of course) XX. I’m still struggling with why I like this band. There’s no especially brilliant musicianship, the songwriting is kind of gloopy, and the production values are like my bedroom 4-track sessions from 1989. Oh wait. THAT’S why I like it. My girlfriend and I did stuff like this decades ago, loved it, and wrote it off as unreleasable. I guess we were wrong; we should have just done a delayed release thing. All of this is my obtuse, backhanded-compliment-way of saying the new release XX by XX is awesome and you should go freakin’ buy it right now. Whatever it is that they’ve done here has a weird genuine-ness to it that holds up to gets better with repeated listens. It sounds kind of like if a chick singer/songwriter joined Pinback, they all got stoned, and then recorded a bunch of songs late one night at one of their apartments trying not to wake up the neighbors.

When they’re not reading Rilke and wondering what it’s like to have sex, they have a band:

We’re making it as easy as possible. Click the X: