Vegas Water Taxi shares bittersweet new single ‘Jamie xx’
Some of the best moments in life are bittersweet, a sentiment captured on ‘Jamie xx’, the latest single from London’s slacker-indie group, Vegas Water Taxi.
Inspired after bandleader Ben Hambro watched the touching coming-of-age drama Aftersun, ‘Jamie xx’ is a gorgeous rumination on the joy and sadness found in life’s best moments, when, to the unsuspecting eye, everything might seem happy and uplifting, but there’s a deep melancholic thread that runs through the gooey centre.
As Hambro explained, “Even though the scene is outwardly joyful, dancing in a club, there’s a deep sadness running through it. It imagines a couple breaking up at a London day festival”.
He added, “I liked the contrast of something quietly devastating unfolding in the middle of all that euphoria, with a few discarded BuzzBalls thrown in to add some real detail to the scene”.
Listening to the track, the romantic element hits first, the upbeat, easy-going arrangements, gentle melody and repeated phrase “tell me you love me at Jamie xx”, giving off a deceptively warm feel that alludes to the simple act of meeting someone and yearning for requited love. Beneath all that, however, lies a more tragic centre, in which the narrator embellishes fantasies about what said love could be, when in reality, it’s gone stale.
The song, which comes as part of the upcoming EP, First Time Listener, includes a similar double entendre to Vegas Water Taxi’s previous singles, in which the narrator often laments relationships and deeper, hidden truths about breakups. On Long Time Caller, for instance, songs like ‘Chateau Photo’ tackled realisations of being ostracised from a group after a breakup, only to realise the sense of freedom it brings instead.
However, where Long Time Caller focused on frayed dynamics and failed relationships, and First Time Listener, specifically Jamie xx’, looks at what all of that actually means in the bigger picture, in a world fixated in the artifice of image and the pretence of things looking a certain way when people don’t put in the work to look at what’s really happening.
As such, it’d be easy to make a case for ‘Jamie xx’ being the best release yet, showcasing both Hambro’s ability to channel complex emotions into storytelling and match the arrangements to that ambiguity. It also resonates because it taps into the confusing swirl of emotions most of us experience daily, especially when it comes to fact and fiction, or the ways reality makes us think we know how we feel, when really, it’s quite the opposite.
As we’ve seen with recent releases, particularly in the indie genre, this is a difficult balance to strike, as after all, it only really works when we can see ourselves in the songwriter’s experiences, and in this case, the bittersweetness in ‘Jamie xx’ is just as much ours as it is Hambro’s.
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