Saying that, however, despite Xiu Xiu
having produced some of the most gut-wrenchingly sad and suffocatingly
desperate music I’ve ever heard, it isn’t all darkness, they’ve always had a playful
side, even if it is a mental one. How else would you explain track titles like ‘I
Luv Abortion’ and videos like this one? In recent releases they’ve even sounded
fairly, well, jovial (at least musically if not lyrically), as with ‘Chocolate
Makes You Happy’ and ‘I Do What I Want, When I Want’. But on this latest
release, all those possible instances of not-necessarily-suicidal music have
been totally extinguished from consideration. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is the most overtly grim Xiu Xiu album in
years. Every track is a lights-off, reverberated, doom-laden sadness exercise.
This isn’t a collection of songs to be enjoyed so much as to be endured,
decorating their strange and experimental soundscape with impassioned
screaming, rumbling bassy synths, chopped vocals, ear-splitting electronic dissonance
and squealing pig samples. Make no mistake, this is pure serial-killer
territory, and the focus isn’t so much on the sad side of things as on creating
a genuinely disturbing, viscerally haunting, terrifying experience, which has
always been a common characteristic of Xiu Xiu, but here that beloved element
is bolstered to a thousand degrees.
Sounds good, right? I mean, I love dark
music, as do a lot of people, and in the past Xiu Xiu have gifted me with music
darker and more uniquely fucked-up than much else I could think of. However, just
because something’s pushing itself as far down the well of darkness as it can
reach, it doesn’t necessarily produce stellar results, and to be frank, Angel Guts: Red Classroom, while it did
leave me adequately disturbed, it also left me - spoiler alert - ultimately a
little unimpressed. It’s not that the crew aren’t trying or aren’t putting as
much creativity into their zero-rules method of experimental song-crafting; by
all means, there’s still plenty of successful bouts of madness. ‘Stupid in the
Dark’ is probably the one song most resembling an actual song, though it doesn’t lose any of its raw appeal by any means, and as a
result it’s one of my favourites – it’s hard not to love the gothic hum of the
synthesisers. Meanwhile ‘Adult Friends’ has some joyously fucked-up
psychosexual issues (The line where touching breasts ‘is like a lobster crawling
over my arm’ is delivered so straight that it works), and ‘El Naco’ is frightening
to the point of nausea, leading me to believe that whether or not you take
pleasure in listening to this sort of thing probably says a lot about you as a
person (It probably says plenty about me). There’s nothing here that reaches
the perfection of classic songs like, say, ‘Apistat Commander’ (although that is
a difficult one to beat for sheer suicidal brilliance), but fans of horrific
sounds will be treated and then some.
In terms of Xiu Xiu’s more quotation-marks ‘artistic’
dalliances, my feelings on this facet of the band’s avant-garde sensibilities
are just as ambivalent as ever. A band called Joy Division created similarly
dark, cuttingly sad music, but did so with an air of absolute dignity. Xiu Xiu
spit out dignity. Part of the joy of listening to Xiu Xiu as a group who
express dark feelings (to put it mildly) is that Jamie Stewart and his
transient entourage have never held back and have never reined it in – their music
is bold and it’s ridiculous and it’s so melodramatic that it almost seems
perfectly pitched, and all this is why they manage to reach naked depths of the
human soul inconceivable to other bands. This is also their biggest problem, of
course, as to anyone who isn’t all that into it, the bewildering artiness that
comes with this mentality probably looks like that episode of Spaced, and even to
a fan like me, it can get tiresome to have your otherwise beautifully
despondent piece of heart-skewering spoiled by the occasional lyric that just
pushes it too far for you to go along with it. Here, the lyrics are so
overshadowed by the screaming presence of the music that it’s not such a gigantic
problem, but in a sense it’s gone the other direction – now the music is so
batshit insane that it’s more pulverising than satisfying, though I guess Xiu
Xiu have made no pretences of being easy listening.
This album’s undoubtedly another treasure
trove for Xiu Xiu fans more dedicated than I am, but for me it’s hard work, and
for light listeners it’s probably way too much. ‘The Silver Platter’, for
instance, is like watching Suspiria in
the dark, on acid, whilst being gently molested. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is guaranteed to be a difficult listen,
and not just in the ‘how-much-can-you-handle’ sort of way. There are just a few
lulls in its aggravated despair, particularly the moody but almost quaintly
beautiful ‘Bitter Melon’, and although I can heartily commend its invention and
the sheer breadth of its fuck-it-let’s-just-do-it horror, it’s patchy and it’s
a little tiring and all its terrifying elements would probably sound a lot more
powerful if there was a little more variation from its unremitting
atrocity-diving. Whether you respond to ‘Black Dick’ with unimpressed laughter
or paranoid horror is a good litmus test for whether this stuff’s for you. If
you’re looking for something upsetting, then by all means, you’re in luck, but
even though it’s arguably Xiu Xiu’s darkest and most psychotic album yet -
which really is saying something – I can’t help but feel that it’s not one of
their greatest.
