By now, you know what you're in for when you put on a new Xiu Xiu record. The songs on the project's latest, Always, would easily fit elsewhere in Jamie Stewart's disquieting catalogue. The music bounces from the shrill synths and howls of pro-choice anthem "I Luv Abortion" to the gentle whimper of the piano ballad "The Oldness", and it's all laced together with too-close-for-comfort lyrics like, "Satan's cock/ Hell is hot," and, "Your father was the first man inside of you." Which is to say that the record functions as a well-executed sampler of the magnified pain and horror we've come to expect from this band. The difficulty for both casual and hardcore fans is that the receptors attuned to the Xiu Xiu experience have become desensitized, so that when a new album comes along, you have to ask yourself: Why should I even bother to listen to this? Why not let it fade into the ether and just revisit my favorite bits of Fabulous Muscles or Knife Play?
Fortunately, at the moments on Always when their most plainly brutal sonics are at their least effective, Xiu Xiu manage to find a fresh angle. One of the most alluring aspects of Xiu Xiu is their ability to spread consistently thorny lyrical content across a wide range of instrumental arrangements. The best songs on Always lean toward the poppier, breathier end of that range. It's not so jarring to hear Stewart sing about his brother's troubled domestic life, as he does on "Joey's Song", but it is jarring to hear him sing it over a lush, shoegaze-inspired synth-pop backing. The album is front-loaded with these inviting juxtapositions, where horrific lyrical imagery collides with rich instrumentation and melodies that scrape the underside of catchy.
The leftist blog ThinkProgress recently called out Always' "I Luv Abortion" for "appropriating a woman's words and experiences... [as] some sort of proof of how cool and dark you are." The music Stewart and his rotating cast of supporters make as Xiu Xiu is many things, but "cool" has never been one of them. Instead, his brand of darkness is painfully earnest, with a relentless decade's worth discomforting albums to prove it. Part of what makes Xiu Xiu refreshingly unfashionable is that this stuff is inimitable: bare-naked expressions of the pain tied to self-mutilation, military violence and everything between can't really be faked. And when you see Stewart’s influence trickle down to a fresh wave of artists, you know they must have forged a genuine connection to his music somewhere along the line.
When the musical elements line up just right on Always, as with "Beauty Towne", a buoyant postscript to Fabulous Muscles highlight "Clowne Towne", it's hard not to dream about Xiu Xiu making a straightforward electro-pop record. (It could happen-- recall the Xiu Xiu cover of Rihanna's "Only Girl".) "Clowne Towne" paired impossibly hopeless "no exit" lyrics with a triumphant, breathy array of plucked strings, and "Beauty Towne" likewise takes a miserable theme and cuts it with an elegant melody, lending a feeling of redemption and hope.
The inspiration for "Beauty Towne" demonstrates how Stewart has guided and inspired a new generation of artists to explore difficult terrain. The single, he recently told Spin, is about some time he spent several years ago living in a "rotted punk house" with a group of people including Mike Hadreas, the Seattle singer-songwriter behind Perfume Genius. "Everyone in that house and the people who orbited it had overly enmeshed, dirty, and at times violent relationships," he said. "All involved parties, to one degree or another, have remained a part of each other lives."
The communal underpinnings of "Beauty Towne" seep nicely into the record elsewhere, too-- the jaunty, "I-hate-waking-up-in-the-morning" album highlight "Honey-Suckle" marks the first time someone besides Stewart (collaborator Angela Seo) wrote both the music and the lyrics for a Xiu Xiu song. Album opener "Hi" is a rare Xiu Xiu track in the second person that addresses a broad audience. "If your curtain is closed/ Yet you are still standing behind it," Stewart sings. "If you don't know what to say, say hi." So long as there are people standing silently behind curtains, they'll need Stewart to sing for them, coaxing his fellow freaks away from the ledge.
