Xiu Xiu - Angel Guts: Red Classroom

Xiu Xiu are a bizarrely eccentric little enclave of a band, and as such they are an entity which can only cater exclusively to a certain type – and I don’t mean that in some sort of exclusively superior hipster-generation sort of way, mainly because the ‘certain type’ of crowd who get the greatest genuine thrill out of Xiu Xiu are probably not the kind of people who anyone would want to be, and it most certainly isn’t the sort of music to impress your friends with. I’m sure that you can figure out within seconds of listening whether Jamie Stewart and company’s sometimes mystifyingly nutty blend of nightmarish soul-stripping and unapologetically avant-garde weirdness is right up your dark, dingy alley or not. I’ve always been a tremendous admirer of Xiu Xiu, both for their wacky experimentation that makes every album salted with novelty and for Stewart’s ability to create works of absolute harrowing genius; frequently disturbing, sometimes startlingly bleak.

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.

Xiu Xiu - Stupid in the Dark