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• The xx

"It's a very special night for us," the xx's Oliver Sim said in one of the band's only instances of between song banter. "It's our first ever headlining show in Seattle. It's very different from Neumos." Leave it to the xx to say it with understatement. Yeah, Showbox SoDo is rather different from Neumos. It's about 1,250 people bigger for one thing, and it's earned an unfortunate reputation as a crap-sounding venue, a concrete box that bounces sound around to no good end. The xx had their own reputation to overcome as well, that of a muted, introverted live band, the kind that might have trouble holding a venue that size at rapt attention. So two wins for last nights show, then: It was the first show I've seen at the Showbox SoDo where everything sounded great everywhere in the venue*, from the front of the stage on back to the beer pen, and the xx, as I saw at SXSW and suggested in this week's Stranger Suggests have their live game tight, commanding the crowd with minimal fuss, just letting their spare seductive songs speak for themselves.

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• The xx

Oh, and they had a pretty killer light show that must've been stowed for SXSW. Before their set began, a white scrim hung over the front of the stage, and for opening number "Intro," the band played behind it, backlit, their shadows dramatically projected and flashing onto the scrim in multiples, first just Romy Madley Croft on guitar, then when the beat dropped Sim on bass and Jamie Smith, who plays to the back of the stage but loomed larger on the screen than either of the others (fukkin' scrims/how do they work?), tap-tapping out the beat on his MPC sampler. On the song's last note, the curtain fell to reveal the trio backed by a giant black X. The crowd—packed and hot up in the front—was going nuts here, by the way, screaming so loudly that they actually seemed to dwarf the band's own objectively louder but perhaps not as extroverted sound (later, some kids were singing along loudly and off-key).

• josh bis
• The xx

The band went on to play everything from their self-titled debut album along with a cover of Kyla's "Do You Mind," killing it throughout, with personal highlights including "Islands" (that pivot point where Sim comes into the song just gets me every time), "Heart Skipped a Beat," "Basic Space," and "VCR." They did the reverb-drippy ambient interlude "Fantasy," one song I hadn't heard them do at SXSW and the kind of album cut that probably doesn't make it into abbreviated festival set lists often, Sim wrapping his mic cord around his hand and stalking the stage a bit almost snarling (something about his profile, his presence, his pronunciation reminds me of Joe Strummer just a little), girls in the crowd squealing, the bass just fucking shuddering—boooooooommmmmmm. Sim was relatively animated throughout the show, twisting side to side, slouching then straightening his spine in a way that was almost sinuous and snake-like (but like a cool cartoon snake, possibly with sunglasses). They closed with "Infinity," doing an extended, amped-up outro on which Sims pounded at a drum cymbal that sat still for most of the band's set. They encored with "Stars," the stage back-lit with constellations of white christmas lights, the big black X a silhouette against them.

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• jj

jj's opening set was a divisive stunt, the Swedish duo pantomiming a live show as much as performing one, running through their oddly affecting songs—balearic Scando-pop with drug talk cribbed from popular hip hop—with a kind of sedated, if sometimes still playful, antipathy for the audience. (Why am I not surprised to find that they run with similarly pranksterish yet twee act the Tough Alliance?) Singer Elin Kastlander, draped in a shawl, glitter on her eyes, her curly blond hair huge and piled to one side, began the set alone onstage, seated on a stool, playing acoustic guitar and singing; she did a one-verse cover of Nirvana's "Lithium" this way to enthusiastic response from the crowd. Then she pressed play on some synched backing track and video projections and one of the band's typically breezy conga beats started playing. She was joined then by bandmate Joakim Benon, who came out with his jacket pulled up over his head, nuzzled into the side of Kastlander's hair, then stood downstage facing the audience while he buttoned his jacket back up. It was going to be this kind of show.

Later, he spent much of the set holding the duo's acoustic guitar, often with his back to the crowd, but either not playing it or plainly just pretending to play it. At one point, he jumped down into the audience and spread his arms birdlike facing Kastlander, eliciting from her a big genuine smile, the only one of the set. Meanwhile, videos playing behind the band showed the bandmembers in home movies (at the beach, younger, with different hair), in music videos (the blood-crying clip for "Let Go"), at home rolling a joint, and even in concert shot from the crowd with other cameras held aloft in the foreground, always synced up and singing along to the songs they were playing (or pantomiming) live—generously, you could interpret all this as some commentary on the spectacle of live performance vs our expectations as viewers (at one point, with his back to the crowd, Benon was just watching the videos too); less generously, it had a whiff of stoned indifference (seriously half the songs were about being on different drugs—lithium, weed, ecstasy, heroin). Whatever the live show, the songs themselves sounded great, all Cure-y sentimentality swept up in light sub-tropical rhythms, with highlights including the Lil Wayne interpolating "Ecstasy," the irrepressibly warm "From Africa to Malaga," and "Things Will Never be the Same Again."

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• Nosaj Thing

Opener Nosaj Thing sounded great as well, doing his preternaturally pretty take on wonky, dubby, bass-centric beats. Next to me in the beer pen, some dude debating the musical merit/skill of Nosaj Thing, who was performing his compositions live via laptop and a sampler, concluded that there must be something to the guy's setup, reasoning, "There's probably more girls on E here than at a Damien Jurado show." (But that would be, what, like one girl, right?)

*Andrew Matson, besides coining the term "noir&b" to describe the xx's sound, rightly theorized that they might be the first band to sound great at the SoDo because their sound is so spare and echo-friendly as to possibly benefit from the place's inimitable acoustic properties.

More photos after the jump.

The xx:

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• The xx

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• the xx

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• The xx

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• The xx

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• The xx

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• The xx

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• The xx

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• The xx

jj:

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• jj

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• jj

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• jj

Nosaj Thing:

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• Nosaj Thing

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• Nosaj Thing