I've thought about this, and decided that it's true - xx is one of those rare records that truly is something like sui generis. That's not to say that the music on it doesn't sometime evoke other artists' work - at various times, I reckon, there are threads of acts like, say, the Cure, Joy Division, Slumber Party and, most of all, the Notwist - but the point is that, girl (Romy Madley Croft) / boy (Oliver Sim) vocals entwining sinuously in obscure - and obscurely memorable - melodies amidst slinky, spare guitar lines weaving through moody landscapes of muffled beats and pulsing bass notes, it doesn't really sound much like anything else I've heard.
It'd be selling the xx short to say that this album is all about mood (the songcraft is too strong for that to be fair), but one thing it does terribly well is sustaining a particular mood - foggy, intimate, breathy, ambient - and the whole thing flows from start to finish, scattered with little gem-like moments along the way. xx isn't particularly an album with stand-out tracks - everything about it just works. It's early days yet for me with this one, but it feels like one of the very small number of indie-rock records of the last decade with something of that elusive savour of greatness.[*]
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[*] Off the top of my head, incidentally, clear (as opposed to possible) '00s qualifiers for that tag - 'greatness' - would be Kid A (in retrospect, clearly the best album full stop of the '00s) and Amnesiac, Funeral and Third (if that last counts as indie-rock - which it may well if Kid A does); Turn On The Bright Lights would almost certainly get there too; maybes would be The Meadowlands, Electric Version, Kill The Moonlight and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, and Boxer - and that's probably it.
