Now that Jamie Stewart's drama, if not his songcraft, seems to be mellowing an iota-- or maybe he's just showing his sense of humor-- Xiu Xiu fans hungry for the new nervousness would do well to seek out the work of former Portland Mercury music editor (and Slender Means label head) Zac Pennington's Parenthetical Girls for a strong dose of panic-pop.
The connections are abundant: Stewart remixed the Girls' debut EP, and Pennington is backed by two members of Stewart's self-professed favorite band, tour- and labelmates the Dead Science. The album contains Xiu-ian xylophones, somber organs, wind instruments, spidery guitars, and brittle electronica, as well as lovely androgynous vocals that tiptoe right up to the shrillness of an opera staged in a psychotherapist's lobby without ever goosing it. Just as Stewart hollered "I won't rest until I forget about it," memory is a burden to Pennington's speakers; see his debut's "Here's to Forgetting" and this album's "Forward to Forget."
Both bands are also preoccupied with reconstructing nightmarish childworlds and treating gender like so much ideological Silly Putty. (Each PG release features artwork depicting Pennington as a pair of epicene cartoons on the verge of preadolescent makeout-- the London Suede meets Strawberry Shortcake.) Xiu Xiu plays songs about abused girls and is named after the film about a teen female lost in a rape-centric state apparatus, while Safe as Houses is a story-album about the abandonment and penetration of young women.
At points, portraying all of this emotional, physical and sexual damage seems less like empathy than it... should? To qualify: the "misogyny" on display here is sophisticated and interesting, way different from the incidental Travis-Bickle-isms of early Smog, and not like painter Francis Bacon referring to women as cows-- it's not even like that photo/fashion-happy gay male in every town who comments on women's appearances to the point that it seems vindictive or even jealous of their allure. It's closer to how the horror of the Alien movies is that the creatures squirt eggs in the mouths of, and impregnate the torsos of, men.
Safe as Houses is a creepily pretty presentation of female reproductive power as a kind of monstrosity: its women are protuberant, seeping, layered apertures. Pennington's falsetto cracks as he references a purgatorial "awkward stage." Multiple songs begin by citing leaks and stains. This is not the commiserating world of Talib Kweli's "Black Girl Pain"; this is the world of Carrie and The Exorcist, in which girl-puberty and menstruation are accursed, as opposed to how the onset of male sexuality is usually construed to be heroic (Goonies, Spider-Man, et cetera). These women dread themselves, and each other. The album's most devastating couplet comes when a mother tells her daughter: "Curls round your cheeks, Christ you look just like me/ When you took nine months to destroy my body." That song, "I Was the Dancer", plays like a fierce update of the Carter Family's "Single Girl Married Girl", another potential duet reduced to monologue.
The lyrical menace is relieved somewhat by an aesthetic that Parenthetical Girls and Xiu Xiu do not share: Several songs hearken to the innocent flirty teen-pop ballads of the late 50s and early 60s, suggesting that Phils Spector and Glass should have worked together, or at least deejayed an experimental prom. Sweeping tunes "The Weight She Fell Under" and "Stolen Children" both smell like teen Fallujah, and will cure anybody's womb envy, but they passionately want to know if you'll still love them tomorrow.
