Xiu Xiu - What The Christ?

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!

otm -- bleakly funny

I'M JUST KIDDING!

I loved Xiu Xiu in college, I even wrote Jamie an email, and he wrote back. That was pretty cool. I Broke Up was my life back then ... fun times. I should check up on their latest albums, I haven't listened to any in a long time.

this is one of those "respect more than enjoy" groups for me. a promise is a pretty astounding album.

saw him open for a Swans show a few years back. After a particularly anguished vocal on one song, a guy sitting near us yelled out "It's all right, dude! It's gonna be OK!!"

I got on the bus between A Promise and Fabulous Muscles (when Pitchfork was giving 'em shine, natch), but my fandom was always sort of... situational? like they played the same outré rôle in my personal musical library that "Pepper" or "Detachable Penis" played on MTV/radio in the 90s... "crazy person music," as Dave Matthews so bluntly put it. Needless to say, this was a fucked-up attitude that drastically circumscribed my own engagement with the music, & ultimately left me feeling that it didn't have very much to offer beyond novelty value. (FWIW, this reductive approach seems fairly common among casual fans of the band, cf. the post upthread from 2013 complaining: the "shocking" "boundary pushing" thing is so ridiculous at this point)

It's only over the past couple of years, in working my way through the many excellent & varied releases either side of those two, that I've come to really respect Jamie as an artist, performer, & innovator -- not just some unhinged weirdo who knows how to push people's buttons. Jordan OTM re: consistently excellent sound design -- even the acoustic album just plain *sounds* really good!!

Years ago, a girl I was dating at the time played "Buzz Saw" for me really loudly in one of the radio station listening rooms (we were both DJs for our college radio station) because she said there was an awesome farty bass noise in it that was one of her favorite sounds ever -- but these days, it's the chimes from the end of that song that stick in my memory like a plaster toe.

Honestly, it was the farty bass that drew me to this band, too.

Whenever I'd play Xiu Xiu on my college radio show I'd have to field angry phone calls and AIMs

I'm not denying the button-pushing, getting-under-people's-skin aspect; I just think there's a lot more variety to their music (in terms of instrumentation, sonic texture, song structure, affect, ...) than they are typically given credit for

Yeah, that's part of the thing, he's pretty inventive with his instrumentation and production. It's not really "this guy's a fucked up weirdo! let's laugh at him!" Dude gets into some pretty intense emotional territory, though, which I personally appreciate because I've seen shit