Best electronic albums of 2015: two

2 – Jamie xx – In Colour (Young Turks)

At some point soon, Jamie xx is going to produce the Kooks covers album that’s going to ruin his career, but right now he’s just completed a perfect hat trick. His debut as The xx, his brilliant Gil Scott-Heron remix, and now this.

Almost everything on In Colour could be a hit single. Here are the tracks in order: a crowd-pleasing synth ecstasy, a brisk house head-nodder, a spacious and haunting breakbeat track, steel drums with a smile, a suspenseful filler, a proper ace builder of a pop track, an all-out club banger, a smooth soul anthem, something that sounds like Black Eyed Peas, a whole heap of swirling sadness and a filmic closer that seems to tie the whole thing together.

Admittedly he doesn’t break new ground, and there’ll be a whole load of balding paper-shufflers buying a CD to put on their coffee table or their tablet computer or whatever it is people put coffee on these days.

But if you skip the Black Eyes Peas one, this is as perfect as it gets: the sound of a producer grabbing the past five years of electronic music and presenting it to us neatly wrapped and bowed. I score this xx out of xx. See what I did there? Cheers, thanks.

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