One wonders where Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart would be without
his songs. If songwriting is his way out of pain—his way to
contextualize life’s darkest moments—one might imagine he’d be in
a world of hurt without music. Instead, Stewart morphs his pain into
the painfully beautiful. By translating heartache and darkness into
striking lyricism and clever arrangements, Stewart momentarily shakes
free from the weight of life, revealing that pain, as its own entity,
can be a glorious thing—a glory that is evident in each of Xiu
Xiu’s six albums, including their newest, Women as Lovers.
“To put any difficult, intense feeling into song, to give it meaning
outside of the overwhelming…” Stewart pauses and then clarifies,
“It’s a way to make it real. It’s not some figment—something
beautiful is in fact occurring.”
It’s hard to explain why something beautiful is occurring. But
beauty—in its most naked state—occurs eternally within Xiu
Xiu’s songs. This is not the beauty of stillness or surface, but rather
that of movement and depth. Stewart delves into subjects most would
rather not (sexuality, incest, torture, etc.) and comes up with
something true—a truth that strips its listeners of all
preconceptions and judgmental notions, touching them deeply without
feeling obliged to explain just why.
For the song “In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall” (off the new
album), Stewart explores humanity’s intrinsic desire for pain. Without
its inexplicable intensity, clearly, we would be bored. “Where does it
hurt?/Without fuss, set my finger there,” he demands, his distorted
vocals quivering over an instrumental arrangement close to doom. “To
touch it, touch it, touch it, touch it/Who there is who is not bored by
this fate?”
Stewart’s songs—made complete by keyboardist Caralee McElroy
and drummer Ches Smith—are neither for the faint of heart nor for
the casual listener. Born out of difficulty, they are certainly not
easy. Xiu Xiu’s sound builds from muffled and desperate to unfettered
and cacophonous—it’s as though 100 geese were shivering quietly
in a field one moment and, in the next, are suddenly startled into
disorderly flight. Amid the discordant arrangement of percussion and
brass, a haunting quality permeates Stewart’s songs, escaping the
speakers like warnings to the weary, as if to say: Be light, but know
your own darkness.
“You had a dream about loss/Within the fruit there are worms/Yet
still a vow to dare ‘good night!'” Stewarts sings in a hushed and
tempered tone atop a strangely catchy melody and snappy taps to the
drum kit. “You had a dream about love/Could it be you are the one who
is waiting patiently for me/to disregard caution/to feign deafness to
protest.”
In the years since Xiu Xiu’s first LP, they have lost and gained
members, performed hundreds of times, covered a handful of Smiths songs
(Stewart is enamored with Morrissey), and recorded a spectrum of sounds
from acoustic and stark to dense and chaotic, all of which are
painfully beautiful, giving the listener an opportunity to momentarily
experience an untouchable truth not found in everyday life.
“The songs are always specifically about something,” Stewart says by
phone from his home in San Francisco. “They are emotionally attached to
a specific thing. The songs will always attempt to be an emotional
commentary.”
Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier worked with Xiu Xiu in recording and
producing Women as Lovers, which is named after the Elfriede
Jelinek novel of the same name. It was the first time Xiu Xiu had
recorded an album with a live drummer (Smith) as opposed to a drum
machine.
“There was a characterization to how the drums were recorded and
they changed the inflection,” explains Stewart. “We were doing things
really different. And not being devoted to any one way of doing things,
the experience was unlike anything before.”
Women as Lovers—arguably their most accessible record
to date, which by no means makes it conventionally accessible—is
a dramatic, forceful album of fragmented, yet oddly appealing
instrumentation, including the Wurlitzer, vibraphone, gong, chime, and
kalimba (a sound box with metal keys). In one instant, a song
may be alone and desperate, threatening to let go the crumbling edge on
which it hangs, and, in the next, it explodes, spitting shards of
untamed anger in all directions. It’s sad and mad and full of passion.
Kind of like life. Just like pain.