"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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