A few months ago, a new friend asked me to make them a Xiu Xiu mix. They were understandably intimidated by the group’s output – an album every year or so since 2002, plus a colossal number of collaborations, EPs and one-off cover versions – but intrigued by the intense passion, numerous musical shifts and goth credentials that I had spent around twenty minutes monologuing about. I agreed instantly, of course – who doesn’t love to make a mix of a favourite group for a new friend? – but the task felt punishing. How to carve a way in to a suite of music that often pushes back against the listener?
I made the mix, but perhaps I should have waited until the release of 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips, and sent it to my friend in full. Unwieldy title aside (it’s the name of a switchblade owned by frontperson Jamie Stewart), Xiu Xiu’s seventeenth studio album is being talked about as their most accessible to date, which it is – but that accessibility doesn’t feel like the result of the group lessening or tempering any of their inherent qualities. The route into this music is smoother than, say, Angel Guts: Red Classroom, but its essence is no less visceral and heightened once you reach the centre.
According to the group, the two motivating forces behind 13″… were “the destruction of previous aesthetic notions, as well as the band’s recent move from Los Angeles to Berlin”. It’s a typically Xiu Xiu mix of high drama and self deprecation, but feels very true of the record, which reflects both a deliberate decision to try a different sound, and the more subtle, almost subconscious switches that can come from a change of location and perspective. Expansive post-rock opener ‘Arp Omni’ aside, the album is industrial pop music, heavy synth glam, big riffs and capital letters.
The perennial Xiu Xiu inflections are present – sweetness delivered with a screeching bite, Stewart’s quiver-to-bark vocal jumps – but the positions are shifted. The tentative, whispered beginning of ‘Sleep Blvd.’ feels like familiar territory, but when it explodes it extends to richly defined heights: a vocal chorus, a guitar chorus, a counter-chorus, a glistening electronic spiral. ‘Pale Flower’ is similarly far-reaching, structured less like a pop song but still grounded by an irresistibly melancholic chorus line. Each song is densely packed and dazzling, but sharper and more ambitious than ever – a credit to band member Angela Seo’s production and John Congleton’s mixing. It’s not surprising that Stewart acknowledges the influence of iconoclasm in general, and Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral in particular on the production, which shines like deep-set chrome.
Along with the well-established duo of Seo and Stewart, drummer David Kendrick (Devo, Sparks) is the third guiding force of 13″…. Xiu Xiu have always had something of a revolving door line-up, but Kendrick already feels like a key player only a few years into his tenure; his controlled-chaos style of playing fitting precisely with this era of the band. Kendrick’s crunchy percussion plays sibling to Stewart’s fuzz-box guitars and Seo’s melodramatic keyboards on ‘Veneficium’, a bombastic fable of feelings made physical (“Sinking into the dust / I was repulsed… Seized by the mass and shape”). The maximalist percussion of Xiu Xiu’s live shows is captured on ‘Maestro One Chord’, incorporating drum kit, gong, and vocalisations treated as percussion. Another telling reference point for 13”… is Einstürzende Neubauten, also Berlin residents, whose maximalist attitude to percussion relates to both sheer volume, and what is considered percussive beyond traditional instrumentation.
Where they have previously utilised irony and contrast in their lyrics – matching lyrical horror with musical sweetness, or vice versa – Stewart’s lyrics for 13”… often match the awe and wonder of their surrounds, even if this expansiveness comes with a punchline (the debris floating in space on ‘Maestro One Chord’ includes “a slap in the face”). The biggest lyrical surprise comes on lead single ‘Common Loon’, an unusually positive Xiu Xiu song about queerness which revels in a multitudinous, fluid mode of gender and sexuality. Stewart’s swaggering guitars and breathy delivery transform a coy question into something more confrontational (“What will you do if and when I am someone else?”). The song’s enigma, attitude, and definition of queerness as delicious and unsettled (‘Cool/Impermanent/Candy’) is reminiscent of R.E.M.’s Monster, another self-consciously iconoclastic record that 13”… shares some jewel-like DNA with.
Another surprising moment comes on ‘T.D.F.T.W.’, which hides some long-gestated forgiveness in its goth disco death rattle (“There is only one person / Whose name can be called out / At the moment of death / And for me that name is yours”). Celebration, forgiveness, wonder – are Xiu Xiu (and Stewart more specifically) experiencing growth, an arrival at a place of learned perspective? 13”… may be accessible, but thankfully it isn’t as simple as that. Especially when listening to the nine track album on a loop, it clearly rejects any sense of conclusion; its narrative is as unfinished as ‘Common Loon’’s queerness.
The album’s disturbed psyche is revealed in its first and final tracks. Opener ‘Arp Omni’ is musically distant from the rest of 13”…, with huge washes of synth and no percussion. It’s our introduction to the album’s world, but there’s a finality to its confessional tone (“I have done almost nothing right my entire adult life / But having dared to touch the fire with you / Breaks the chains of my being nothing”) and a last-gasp quality to its sentimental romance (“With freckles as sparkling as yours / Who could dare to un-sparkle your dots?”), like the final transmission from a dying star. Then there’s seven tracks of flawless industrial pop music, then we’re left with ‘Piña, Coconut & Cherry’ – a screeching melodrama of ten-feet-tall chords, electronic stabs and emotional extremity (“I never thought I could love this hard for this long! / It makes me insane! / You can’t refuse love like this / It’s criminal / You must love me, love me, love me!”). Stewart crawls and screams over a keyboard preset, a breakdown in a tacky hotel room, the excess scraped off the rest of the record and dumped, dripping off its final track. It’s funny, terrifying, extreme, horny, embarrassing, relatable – everything that Xiu Xiu have ever been at once. And you’re either left there, or you start all over again with reserved, romantic wonder. 13”... is a superlative pop record, but still an endless cycle of extremes. A shining, distorted, expertly constructed, open-ended record, that might be Xiu Xiu’s best.
