LA-via-Nashville singer-songwriter and erstwhile Tiësto collaborator morgxn has followed up on his recent LGBT-affirming music video for “home” with a trippy club video (whic offers viewers “a chance to escape into a world where gender, color, and orientation don’t keep us divided”) for “xx”, the fifth track from his forthcoming debut EP vital.
The song’s title not spelled as it is pronounced (‘kiss-kiss’): all the better to distinguish it from older identically titled tracks from Chris Brown and Holly Valance. It is everything you would want in a dance anthem; it infectiously spells out the urgency and hedonic highs catalyzed by a rarified physical connection: ‘Kiss, kiss/ Don’t how to be hopeless/ Hopin’ to the end/ Kiss, kiss/ Catch me by surprise/ I can't forget anymore/ More, oh, oh’.
There are also some eclectic influences in this radio-ready tune, thanks to morgxn’s childhood experience of singing in gospel choirs in Nashville (he described himself as “the small, chubby Jewish kid who had the biggest voice in the room” in a 2016 interview with Idolator). His androgynous falsetto provides a soulful quality that lends some emotional gravity and depth to the song’s pounding synthesizers and uptempo indie-rock instrumentation.
True to form, “xx”includes a subtext of catharsis and transcendence over trial and hardship, as a result of morgxn’s many years of soul searching and aesthetic experimentation:
"We are born into this world knowing how to love, but we forget, every day, that it's our right to feel it. To receive it. 'xx' is reclaiming that for myself. This song was the genesis of my project. It came from years of searching and wandering and creating. X marks the spot... so they say. to me, an X is all about transitions and crossroads, and finally claiming that transition for myself” (Line of Best Fit).
