Xiu Xiu - What The Christ?

don't actually care about the dumb twitter beef, but xiu xiu's production is so slept on. all the sampling sources, sound design, & everything are so detailed and creative, too bad it apparently gets overshadowed by his aesthetic. plenty of good songs too.

also he's a nice dude. i went to see a (free) show where they didn't play because some essential piece of gear broke, and he gave me & my gf a bunch of free vinyl.

i mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKWckRuz-gk

yeah, i like xiu xiu, too. i remember in college i wrote jamie an email and he wrote a nice email back. seemed like a cool guy.

i love the part at 8:15, creating a chord out of a kick drum via EQ only, i think about that all the time.

I like xiu xiu and I like "I hope the new POPE fucks your heart out"

"I am a sad consumer" tweets are the goddam worst

the best was when i saw xiu xiu play an art museum and i got to watch all the horrified middle-aged rich museum member ladies run for the hills halfway through the first song.

They were probably rushing across the street to try to purchase the album at a Starbucks.

when the show was over some lady was trying to give away her album because she bought it before the show and didn't know what the band sounded like

I like that Nina Simone cover. I don't know if I'd go in for a whole album, but the arrangement is interesting, and not at all what I was expecting.

i will always just think of ilm when i see that name. that's all i think of. xiu xiu and the junior boys. you REALLY have to like his voice to listen at all because its right in your earhole the whole time. too close, dude. i can't do it.

i worry about jamie hurting his neck because of the way he stands when he sings and plays- that's gotta hurt

nice guy! we played a fun show with them so I am biased to take his side against the twitterers

Xiu Xiu fans: Evaluate this (profoundly NWS) picture of Jamie Stewart.

i think this guy is the future...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0uu79FWKgc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS2wNx1lEIg

Scott to really buy the ticket you need to be in 2002 and listen to "Knife Play"

Based on your recommendation this Lansing-Dreiden re-issue has been making my summer great so

why are there so many threads about xiu xiu it sucks

"Based on your recommendation this Lansing-Dreiden re-issue has been making my summer great so"

yay! they did such a great job with the vinyl. sounds amazing.

the twitter beef is actually a local beef. all three speakers lived in the same town for the last few years. two of them (ross and brad) love the town fiercely - some people who live there really love it a whole lot. when jamie lived there, he hated it, and went out of his way to say everywhere how horrible he thought it was. most of his observations about the town seemed made from the perspective of somebody who sat in his house all day and said "man! I hate this town!" jamie's gone now but people in his former town will basically take any opportunity to say "that guy's a dick" for the next 1,000,000 years.

(disclosure, I live there too & still do, and consider jamie a friend, but his bullshit on this issue was really a lot to take.)

lol

that's great

I read the interview where Jamie supposedly talked shit on the town (wherever it was, I forget) and I thought it was pretty mild. He pretty much copped to being depressed generally and his location wasn't helping. People really shouldn't take shitting on their hometown so seriously especially to the point where years after the fact they are attacking the person in question on an unrelated issue. Well I really love Xiu Xiu and most everything they've done (some stuff more than others, obvs) and Jamie is really the sweetest, nicest person. IDK why the hate at all. Lovely voice too - and yeah, right on about the sound design/production. A cult band for all time...

yeah I live here. it was constant. it wasn't just that interview. as I say, he is a personal friend. we had dinner with one another when he was here on many occasions, both at one another's houses and out on the town. he is a sweet person who I like, and he's full of shit, these don't actually contradict each other.

so brad deleted his twitter account over this, huh?

you're talking about Durham, NC right?

this is a great band and people who disagree are wrong and unamerican

The Nina record and "Red Guts" are so, so amazing ACTUALLY

yeah, he really nails that uncomfortable space between pop and outre performance art. my friend used to hang out with jamie stewart sometimes in north carolina. iirc he said he was "a weird guy, but not that weird really."

i appreciate a promise a lot, it was an important record for me during a very difficult part of my life but i find it extremely challenging to listen to any his other work

The Air Force is one of my favorite records ever. Xiu Xiu are in a league of their own.

fabulous muscles, you're the one for me

Vaguely tempted to spend too much $$ on the Twin Peaks soundtrack cover LP they're putting out for RSD.

I liked to play "rank the records" with Xiu Xiu a lot, but their development has happened at a molecular level. There haven't been any pop songs in over ten years.. his lyrics went from "lyrics" to "monologues" to "literally don't give a fuck".. finally with "Red Guts" there is no harmonic material whatsoever, it's just this kind of hooky, beautifully-produced noise music. It's funny that two of my least-favourite-sounding albums from 2014 were produced/recorded by Congleton, but then "Red Guts" is easily one of the best-sounding albums I've ever heard.

rn the only Xiu Xiu albums I'd destroy are Fabulous Muscles, La Foret, and certain collaborations, pretty much everything else has swung up into "essential" territory.

The cover of "Falling" is terrific for so many reasons, I mean, it seems like Xiu Xiu wanna cover only the most impossible-to-cover songs ("Ceremony"? "Fast Car"? "Under Pressure"? Nina Simone's catalogue?) but yeah this one is especially such a grand slam

Fabulous Muscles and La Foret are my second and third favorite Xiu Xiu albums, with Knife Play eternally holding the top position due to the way it ripped the top of my head open the first time I heard it and only being able to really feel that way once.

They are doing the Twin Peaks thing around the corner from my apartment on Friday. I should get over the dread of interacting with other people and go, yeah?

go go go go go absolutely go, i saw jamie live solo in 2012 and it was one of the most intense and affecting performances i've ever seen. somehow he made a shitty tex-mex restaurant feel like a funeral parlor

due to the way it ripped the top of my head open the first time I heard it and only being able to really feel that way once.

a promise did this to me, i think the first xiu xiu track i heard was "blacks" and it was very overwhelming

i can see people being not enthusiastic about all things Xiu Xiu (I'm not myself) but I never understood the absolute revulsion some poeople have had. This thread isn't the only time I've run across it.

i completely understand the absolute revulsion people have

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk1qjjU9jQc

i understand the revulsion but otoh ppl i really vibe with tend to get at least some aspect of xiu xiu. i admit i haven't really kept up but their older stuff is so special to me. i never thought jamie got enough credit for how funny he could be.

Really dug everything up to and including (especially actually) Fabulous Muscles. La Foret was OK, last one I heard. Really liking the samples of the other stuff. Have a lot to go through.

Fabulous Muscles is seen by most as a watershed moment, but it was so disappointing to me-- the loss of the gamelan, the inferior versions of songs from the tour split EP with Jim Yoshii, and the "hit" was a Ten In The Swear Jar song. idk! Lots of people love that record.

The Air Force was amazing, right off the top, the "good engineering work, Greg Saunier" snare sound had me like "yayyyy the Roland SP-303 has been put back in the closet"

there's gamelan on fab muscles! clowne towne is an amazing song.

fab muscles is where I got off the bus, it was v disappointing to me

cad u are right tho Jamie can be very funny

i can't remember too much about 2003 but i remember sad pony guerrilla girl doing something i didn't know about before

Jamie was the first songwriter who struck me as really deeply deliberately funny in a kind of "Morrissey, but American" kind of way, like "here are some jokes strung together into a lyric", and it worked!

tbf this does seem to be the third album in their "hell" series (following Angel Guts and Basket Of Fruit)

my fault for not really paying attention until now. extremely convincing evocation of the abyss

first three tracks of this sounded incredible, looking forward to digging in/feeling bad. thought _forget_ was a really strong xiu xiu pop record, but the noise records have been peaks over the last decade.

reading the below line from the album description earlier reminded me of fgti's v perceptive comments upthread:

"Xiu Xiu has spent twenty years grappling with how to process, to be empathetic towards, to disobey and to reorganize horror;"

this really is some of the worst music ever made, I recoil viscerally from his entire aesthetic

my fave Xiu Xiu memory is watching an interminable, excruciating opening set for Swans and at a particularly self-indulgent faux-agony moment someone yelled out "it's OK dude! it's gonna be all right!"

Every time this thread gets bumped I think "There's a new Xiu Xiu album called What the Christ??!"

― Mark E. Smith died this year. Or, maybe last year. (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 30 March 2021 12:54 (two years ago)

*Twin Peaks itishappeningagain.gif*

Also lol sleeve, for some reason people shitting on Xiu Xiu is very amusing to me (I say this as a fan). There is just something so appropriate, so cosmically and karmically right, about people hating this weird funny music.

Truly one of the great troll bands of our time (not just in the sense of doing inflammatory things, but "This guy has probably gotten banned from Something Awful and/or paid to have someone else banned")