Ever since the release of their 2002 debut Knife Play, Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart has been hard at work redefining the concept of "challenging" music. Rather than obfuscating songs with grating noise and ostensibly atypical structures, Stewart challenges the most fundamental conventions of musical expression and honesty with an intensity that's often been misread as parody, irony or cheap theatrics. Thus, while Xiu Xiu's music has continued to gain support in recent years, it's rare to hear a recommendation that isn't qualified with some sort of hesitant apology for the band's atypical instrumentation and over-the-top delivery.
Well, all that can end right now. After showing tremendous musical growth on last year's A Promise, Stewart has come frighteningly close to producing his masterwork-- an album that's as accessible as it is unconventionally affecting. On Fabulous Muscles, Stewart plays with dissonance without succumbing to it, contorting electronic drones, drum machine beats and his own haunting tenor into a propulsive and elegant record. The songs are often tremendously dense, but the combinations and contrast Stewart teases out of the mix are always immediate and striking. Indeed, the quality of the melodic and instrumental interplay here is right up there with many more straightforward pop bands, but Stewart manages to use it to an entirely different end. Detached from the safety and set form of traditional pop music, Fabulous Muscles is an album bursting with tension, tenderness, pain, and restraint-- concepts that have informed Xiu Xiu's music from the beginning, but which the band has never so deftly expressed.
"Crank Heart" immediately establishes Fabulous Muscles as both accessible and deeply layered. Perfectly balancing melody, energy and chaos, the song sounds as if it's ready to blow apart at any minute, held together only by a hauntingly present force of will. The tension increases on the album's title track, which appeared last year on a split EP with the Jim Yoshii Pile-Up. This new version foregoes the spooky atmospherics and whirring spaceship sounds of the EP version in lieu of a chilling, almost self-punishing restraint.
This restraint is often shaken by an underlying intensity, best conveyed on "I Luv the Valley OH!", quite possibly the finest single track Xiu Xiu has ever released. "I Luv the Valley OH!" is an immediately accessible song, but also a profoundly subversive one. Mimicking traditional pop forms while simultaneously defiling them, the intrinsic discomfort of "I Luv the Valley OH!" comes through in both its structure and its articulation. The song's titular scream provides the frozen emotional centerpiece for a feverish and insistent dirge, and a rare moment of absolute release amidst an album often marked by a chilling sense of emotional confinement.
Only once does Fabulous Muscles threaten to descend into absolute cacophony. On the harrowing "Support Our Troops (Black Angels OH!)", Stewart tackles politics with characteristic intensity. Rather than hiding behind tried-and-true anti-war sloganeering, Stewart delves into the troubling psychology of war. Whether or not the sentiments expressed here are "correct" is entirely moot-- what's striking about the song is not so much its direct political implications, but the overwhelming and sincere sense of human terror that permeates it.
Part of what makes this record so powerful, though, is the fact that this darkness often lifts. On "Clowne Towne", Stewart sings, "Your true self has become weak, alone, and annoying/ A true ridiculous dumbass," in an oddly sweet combination of fondness and frustration that fits perfectly into a disarmingly catchy song. "Little Panda McElroy", which first appeared on the same split EP as "Fabulous Muscles", remains one of the most poignant and complicated love songs I've ever heard. With lyrics like, "I can stop wanting to kill myself.../ Because of you," this is about as far from your typical, rote and sterile love song as you can get. This version offers an even more moving musical exploration, as Stewart's breathy voice is subsumed by pulsing electronic drones into a single, insistent beat.
Though there are many notable high points to Fabulous Muscles, its overwhelming consistency is what cements its place as Xiu Xiu's finest. The album does not contain a single hiccup or yawn-- no extraneous noise, no potentially offputting histrionics, no throwaways and no dull moments. Fabulous Muscles, like the best of Xiu Xiu's catalog, is challenging not because it's particularly dissonant or noisy, but rather because it addresses you in a manner that's categorically different from what you've come to expect from any kind of music-- pop, experimental or otherwise. With Fabulous Muscles, Jamie Stewart continues to explore and expand this mode of address, and in doing so has made an album that is profound, innovative, and absolutely vital.
