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Xiu Xiu’s 13” Is Another Gut-Punch of an Album From the World’s Most Visceral Band

13” manages to lean closer to pop than any other album released by Xiu Xiu, while easily maintaining the band’s archetypal weirdness, love for experimentation and, above all else, pure viscerality. 

Xiu Xiu’s 13” Is Another Gut-Punch of an Album From the World’s Most Visceral Band

There is no band quite as adept at actualizing the ineffable as Xiu Xiu. Over the course of their whopping 17-album discography, Xiu Xiu have managed to consistently put words and sound to feelings that I didn’t realize I felt, or even could feel at all. It’s not that other music isn’t evocative, but that Xiu Xiu’s music doesn’t evoke a feeling so much as it embodies it. Perhaps the best way to describe the distinction is via a cover: Tracy Chapman’s original “Fast Car” is phenomenal and heart-wrenching, intense and expressive, but Xiu Xiu’s 2003 cover of it doesn’t make me feel sad so much as the song itself feels like “sad.” The track seems like it’s actively weeping, less a song than an auditory depiction of that strange post-cry mix of light-headedness and limb heaviness. (Frankly, I still don’t know why we spent so much time talking about Luke Combs when Xiu Xiu’s cover was right there.)

In other words, Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo (alongside more recent addition, percussionist David Kendrick) have long trafficked in the art of what I subconsciously think of as “gut-music”—music that aims not for the head or the heart but for the gut. Above technical prowess or genre adherence or audience enjoyment, it often feels like Xiu Xiu’s primary purpose in any song is to recreate a specific sensation, emotion or experience more honestly and purely than could ever be possible through words alone. And unsurprisingly, their 17th full-length record, 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips (titled after a particularly beloved switchblade in Stewart’s extensive knife collection), is no deviation from that norm, even as its accessibility and general ease of listening sets the album apart from much of the band’s discography. Mixed by John Congleton and produced by Seo, 13” manages to lean closer to pop than any other album of their (at least since 2017’s Forget) while easily maintaining the band’s archetypal weirdness, love for experimentation and, above all else, pure viscerality. 

13” doesn’t make you wait very long for that first gut punch. Hardly a minute into the album, we already get Stewart’s voice catching with grief as they warble, low and hushed, “I have done almost nothing right / my entire adult life” over a mournful string section, the vocals themselves feeling on the verge of tears. There is a quiet grandeur to it too, to the sotto rumbles of synth and the yearning string movements behind Stewart’s confessional lyrics—the grandeur not of a royal ballroom but of a silent planetarium starscape. There is a vastness to the intimacy of it. Is there a word for when you feel a bubble rise up in your throat so you avert your gaze to the floor and try to talk through it anyways, but end up failing so badly at hiding whatever emotion you tried to stomach that you then feel stripped raw with unintentional vulnerability? Not in English, at least, but there is a voice for it: Stewart’s (specifically, Stewart’s at minute 1:35 of opening track “Arp Omni”). 

Around the halfway mark is “Veneficium,” which takes the intimacy of “Arp Omni”’s grief and expands it into something existential. Distorted and fuzzy, filled with percussive ricochets and thrumming bass (and a catchy guitar riff peppered throughout), “Veneficium” feels heavy, like a weighted blanket sans the comfort. It’s the sensation of being on a Gravitron at a carnival or fair, held against the metal wall by force alone, unable to even lift your arm—but turned into an emotion, and then a song. There’s not a name I can put to that feeling, but I have felt it. And so, apparently, has Stewart, who can be heard wailing through reverb about feeling “pressed down into dust” and asking, uneasy and with no small amount of desperation, “Is it all it is?”

And it wouldn’t be a Xiu Xiu album without at least one song that feels like an anxiety attack somehow distilled into musical form, then injected straight into your veins. There’s the manic, eerie menace of “T.D.F.T.W.” (standing for “The Devil Forgiven, That’s Why,” a phrase that feels like an odd inversion of “What Would Jesus Do?”) and Stewart and Seo’s hurried, arhythmic duets; then there’s the dissonance and unpredictability of “Bobby Bland,” complete with lots of heavy breathing. Most of all, though, Xiu Xiu fans looking for that classic Jamie Stewart breakdown will not be disappointed by the album’s closer, “Piña, Coconut & Cherry”—Stewart screams, fully screams, at length about the kind of insatiable, obsessive love that is buoyed by entitlement, infatuated with consumption and doomed to abandonment. The track is equal parts panic and anger, and feels not dissimilar to repeatedly banging your head against the wall if only for the satisfaction of the blood trickling down your face—a far cry from the love songs that open the album. 

Yes, love songs; while “Piña, Coconut & Cherry” certainly returns to the fury and mania characterizing many Xiu Xiu hits, a large portion of 13” seems to veer away from that familiar whetstone of self-flagellation. Aside from the casual devastation and the lump it leaves in your throat, “Arp Omni” is undoubtedly one of Xiu Xiu’s most positive songs in recent history: the speaker has done nothing right, save for loving the song’s subject (Stewart even calls it “a little sweetie ballad about falling for a person who takes risks in life”). “Maestro One Chord” is unrelentingly chaotic and often ominous, but is also “curious and unafraid,” as Stewart whispers partway through, and despite the permeating sense of dread the track evokes, there is no punishment at its end waiting to reprimand the speaker for their lack of fear. The refrain that makes up the skeleton of “Pale Flower” is unexpectedly hopeful: at the start of the track, Stewart wonders “Is today more than but a wound?” and the song answers over and over again “but tonite, but tonite could be” (albeit over backgrounded grainy screams, electronic wails and heavy bass). “Sleep Blvd.” expands on the “unafraid” line from “Maestro One Chord”; over muted guitar and stark instrumentation, Stewart sings “I was afraid / of darkness / I was afraid / of lightning / they don’t concern me anymore.” This tranquility is interrupted by the banging of drums and loud guitar before resuming once more in time for Stewart to whisper “Shush shush said I / to the discotheques / of discontent,” as if the act of Stewart putting feeling to words and singing is itself shushing the dissonant, distorted “discotheques” of sound that violently flare between verses. While the hope hesitantly put forth in these songs is never given unqualified and never presented as sure fact, its consistent inclusion throughout the album grounds the record in a quiet determination that, however anxious, feels unusual in its positivity.

The pop lean of the post-industrial anthems populating 13” marks a clear departure from the more grating, experimental scaffolding of recent releases like 2023’s Ignore Grief or 2019’s Girl With a Basket of Fruit. Nearly every song on the album follows conventional songwriting structure, with verses and bridges and choruses galore. Synths reign in the backdrop while catchy guitar riffs hold centerstage, and there are hooks that will get stuck in your head for days. In this sense, it’s undoubtedly closest in form and tone to Forget, the band’s previous “poppiest” album. But even so, 13” somehow manages to avoid feeling like Forget 2.0, or like it’s just retreading old ground. Perhaps this is because Forget seemed to know what it was and what it wanted to be, while 13” abandons that certainty entirely, instead seeing Xiu Xiu at the mercy of their own music’s whims. 

The result? “As much as we like this record,” Stewart told Paste last week, “I’m very confused by how it turned out the way that it turned out.” Fittingly, the album’s official description begins with Blixa Bargeld’s famous quote about quitting The Bad Seeds: “I did not join a rock and roll band to play rock and roll!” 

13” is Xiu Xiu’s reimagining of that sentiment: They did not make a psychedelic rock record to play psychedelic rock. Despite originally intending to lean heavily into the psychedelia of it all, the band—especially Stewart—balked partway through the album’s creation when they realized they were, in fact, making a “rock” album, and worse, that they liked it. Xiu Xiu isn’t a rock band, has never been a rock band… but what if it is? Does it even matter?

As 13” makes evident: not really. And that’s a good thing.

The thing about Xiu Xiu, I’ve always found, is that genre becomes almost irrelevant in the face of the sheer distinctiveness of their sound. Any attempts to fit within a genre results not in a transformation of Xiu Xiu’s own music by the limitations of the genre, but a transformation of the genre itself due simply to its proximity to the radiating force of the band’s gleeful experimentation. Take “Common Loon,” the lively lead single off 13” and arguably one of Xiu Xiu’s poppiest tracks throughout their entire 22 year lifespan. All sharp guitar riffs and glockenspiels beneath breathily coy whispers of “What will you do if and when I am someone else,” the track is a downright anthem for weirdos and freaks placed anywhere along the fluid spectrum of identity. In “Common Loon,” they turns away from self-flagellation entirely, instead celebrating the perversities so many other songs and albums have bemoaned, even punished. It’s queerness and oddity with no drawbacks, just the “unquenchable personal requirement to wild out,” to quote the band themselves. It feels triumphant, relishing in itself. Longtime Xiu Xiu listeners might hold their breath waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never does, and the relief is almost as disconcerting as the song itself.

“Common Loon” is indeed more accessible than other entries into Xiu Xiu’s catalog—but only in comparison to their other tracks. When plucked away from the band’s sphere and placed in the larger context of modern music, the song’s sound is immediately identifiable as one thing, and it’s not pop or psychedelic rock. It’s Xiu Xiu themselves. The same goes for 13” at large: Whether they’re working in pop or psychedelic rock or post-industrial noise or something else entirely, Xiu Xiu will always sound like Xiu Xiu, at least so long as they maintain their defining fervent devotion to the viscerality of expression. And thankfully, as 13” makes very clear, that is one thing Xiu Xiu does not seem to plan on stopping anytime soon.

Read out recent interview with Xiu Xiu here.


Casey Epstein-Gross is a New York based writer and critic whose work can be read in Paste, Observer, The A.V. Club, Jezebel, and other publications. She can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television, film, music, politics, or any one of her strongly held opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on Twitter or email her at [email protected].

 
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