Jamie Stewart has always worked with a rotating cast in Xiu Xiu, including Cory McCulloch and Deerhoof's Greg Saunier. But Stewart's strong personality made it feel like a solo project-- at least until Caralee McElroy came along. It's not immediately obvious why she would become so strongly associated with Xiu Xiu by fans, in a way prior collaborators weren't. She joined after Stewart's flagship album, Fabulous Muscles, and she didn't divert much attention from his dark charisma. Instead, she pierced through in small ways: scatters of gamelan, synthesized ruffles, cuddly lead vocals on "Hello from Eau Claire". She seemed a calming presence in Stewart's turbulent world. But mostly, it just seemed right that there should be two, a boy and a girl, a xiu and a xiu. One person alone in the woods is a scary story. Two is a fairy tale.
Alas, McElroy has left the Xiu Xiu fold and joined Cold Cave. Dear God, I Hate Myself features collaborators both new-- Angela Seo on pianos, synths, and drum programming-- and old, like Saunier, Deerhoof's John Dieterich, and out-music drummer Ches Smith. It leans heavily on some "crossover album" signifiers: There's lots of steamy synth-pop and gothic chiptune; a traditional folk cover ("Cumberland Gap") and a guest choir on "This Too Shall Pass Away (For Freddy)". But Xiu Xiu's music has always featured constant cosmetic modification, and fans will find themselves on familiar turf. New listeners will be immediately confronted with a couple of very catchy, horror-laced new wave anthems about fatal beatings and bulimia, and make that perennial first-Xiu-Xiu-experience decision: Do I buy this?
"If you expect me to be outrageous/ I will be extra outrageous," Stewart sings on "Gray Death", but that's a tall order for a guy who began his career with albums called Knife Play and Fag Patrol. If his obsessions with negative self-image, violence, and mental disorder have lost some of their shock value, that's okay: "Gray Death" doesn't need it to be an excellent song. It has an instantly appealing vocal melody and an urgent arrangement for acoustic guitar and synthesizer, not to mention one of those touching moments Stewart uses to temper his brutality: "You were beautiful and I loved you/ My little bank robbing boy/ You were beautiful and I lost you/ Like a whip covered in pins and glue." Now that the novelty of his volatile temperament has worn off, we can hear his sharp songwriting and fascinating sound design more clearly.
The album has strong elements of pastiche. "Hyunhye's Theme", one of those creaky ballads Stewart does so affectingly, stands apart from all the sweaty art-pop, as do the bleary strings of "Impossible Feeling". This sense of ordered disturbance plays out in individual songs, too. There's a snippet of blocky rock guitar airdropped into the soft contours of "Gray Death", and the title track is a chest-beater that repeatedly breaks down into everything from IDM blips to hip-hop scratches. Over a rubbery pulse, "Chocolate Makes You Happy" seems to transform bar by bar-- flurries of computer noise, broken bells, touch-tone synths and more weave in and out of the aching vocal line. These are songs with their hair sticking up. This cultivated chaos produces complex music filled with insinuating hooks.
The chiptune elements tend to be the weakest links. Stewart made four tracks primarily on music software for the Nintendo DS, which can obviously get a little chintzy-sounding. It works fine on the title track, where the bouncy glitches have powerful vocal and guitar parts to play against. But "Apple for a Brain", with its weaker vocal melody and more pronounced video game sounds, feels listless and bare. Xiu Xiu should never even remotely remind you of Atom and His Package. Luckily, most of the album avoids easy preciousness and focuses on Xiu Xiu's more troubled, troublesome variety. It's remarkable how much mileage he's wrung out of basically melding New Order with the Suspiria soundtrack. Every time he's about to come out with a new album, I think, "I must be over this by now." I never am. Even without McElroy at his side, he's still got plenty of excoriating to do, and a surplus of pressurized self to vent.
