Burdened by a strong personality and a difficult homelife, Jonathan Caouette turned to obsessive self-documentation as a way to distance himself from his problems. From age 11 onward, Caouette locked the camera's lens on himself and his inconceivably dysfunctional family, capturing every tragedy in their spectacular meltdown. Those years of navel-gazing eventually culminated in his meta-documentary Tarnation, a riveting record of one young man's attempts not just to survive, but to flourish under impossible circumstances. The music of Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart occupies an aesthetically similar space. Artists who intimately embrace their own struggles are commonly chided for being solipsistic, but Stewart, like Caouette, engages in a self-scrutiny so ruthless and unflinching that it surpasses mere melodrama and becomes magnetic, grotesque, even beautiful. Their work seems less a vehicle for vanity or narcissism than an instrument of basic survival.
Xiu Xiu's last album, Fabulous Muscles, found Stewart reaching the apex of his accomplishments to date. All the hallmarks of the earlier records-- the juxtaposition of cloying sentimentality with base brutality, sculpted cadences with nebulous noise, and husky whispers with tortured screams-- were wrangled into precise pop clockwork. Pitch-perfect blends of emotional exigency and musical accessibility like "I Luv the Valley OH!" broadened Xiu Xiu's audience beyond those willing to grit their teeth and wade through a morass of confrontational clangor. La For\xEAt, however, backs off dramatically from the pop side of Fabulous Muscles to expand upon its quiet, murky dimension. Here, Stewart's vocals hang in hazy suspensions of wafting guitars, piercing chimes, subliminal drones, and ornately wrought percussion. "Clover" forgoes noisy protrusions in favor of tiptoeing guitar, xylophone, and small, sweeping whirs; "Mousey Toy" is a dirge of ghostly piano, rattling percussion, and a noisy midsection of atonal flourishes, martial rim shots, and gong-like crashes.
There are upbeat holdovers: "Muppet Face", after opening with cascading glockenspiel, blossoms into a lean, multilayered synth groove, a mechanism with many tiny moving parts interlocking complexly, while the excellent "Bog People" is a runaway engine of crisp guitars and synths, drum claps and ratcheting percussive undercarriage. Xiu Xiu's resonance with Joy Division's knotted, barren dread has been noted often, but the similarity to Conor Oberst is usually ignored. It's especially apparent on "Bog People": "There will always be a headless neck/ There will always be happiness," Stewart sings, tweaking the last syllable of happiness, and going on to push fervently against his vocal range in a way that will sound instantly familiar to Bright Eyes fans. "Pox", another clear standout, is a suicide glide through skittering drums, slithering guitars, and an urgent electronic pulse.
One of Xiu Xiu's greatest assets is singularity: You'd never mistake one of their songs for another band's. While some music carries on a heritage, Stewart's seems like a purely generative, spontaneous expression of a unique sensibility, and what's especially remarkable is how a record that seems so brash on the surface reveals its subtlety by increments. Over repeated listens, a dialogue emerges within Stewart's lyrical blend of the sweet and profane. La For\xEAt is a record that mutters to itself in the dark: "I tried hard to be good to you," Stewart sings on "Clover", "I felt peace inside my head." And after what seems like an eternity on this content-loaded record-- we didn't even touch on one of the best songs, the beautifully deformed smooth-jazz of "Ale", with its measured, plosive foghorn tones and razor-sharp lyrical turns-- that call is answered on the ominously amorphous "Rose of Sharon (Grey Ghost)": "You tried so hard to be as sweet as you can for me/ But I don't see you for who you are."
