Xiu Xiu
Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1
POLYVINYL
Xiu Xiu, the project that’s given us nearly 25 years of depressive, violent, and alienated experimental noise music under titles like Dear God, I Hate Myself, has unexpectedly gone soft. Back in 2021, the group released an album of relatively tame duets in appreciation of its list of guest features, all artists who’ve stood by Jamie Stewart over the years in the midst of “surprising acts of betrayal and disrespect” perpetrated by other peers, as the press materials aggressively put it. The title of Xiu Xiu’s last album even seemed to fawn at the craftsmanship of the exact object of violence that was carelessly wielded in the title of the band’s 2002 debut.
Which isn’t to say that the music itself has softened much. The aforementioned 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips was full of dark beats, searing industrial guitars, and Stewart’s perpetually worrying vocal quaver, while 2023’s Ignore Grief was pure dark-ambient morbidity. Following album-length reinterpretations of the dark sounds of Nina Simone and the Twin Peaks soundtrack earlier in their career, Xiu Xiu’s new collection of covers may just be the most defining work of this stage of the project’s lifespan as it not only captures the broad spectrum of artists who’ve inspired their work, but also the way they’ve been influenced by the output of, say, Robyn to continue creating sounds that are unwaveringly dark.
The 12 covers on Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 are pretty evenly split between the type of thing you’d always dreamed of Xiu Xiu covering (Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, Coil), music you might dread hearing them take on (GloRilla, “Dancing on My Own”), and artists whose songs have been covered to death in nearly every genre (Daniel Johnston, Roy Orbison, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; also, after countless tribute comps last year, Talking Heads). Yet there’s obviously something special about “Psycho Killer” being sung by someone who sounds as tense and nervous as the song’s narrator, someone who can easily convince the listener that they’re capable of such violent tendencies. Likewise, “I Put a Spell on You” sounds like it’s being banged out on the Roadhouse stage, and “In Dreams” is seemingly approached less as an homage to Orbison as it is to Frank Booth.
“The enduring and basic throughline with all of [our cover albums] is an attempt to say thank you to those songs,” Stewart shared in a press statement. Even in their earliest years Xiu Xiu were covering and being covered by peers like WHY?, and hopping on tribute albums to groundbreaking weirdos like Björk. If ever Xiu Xiu had a happy place it would be cozily nestled inside a song by Grace Jones or Soft Cell, like Lynch’s Lady in the Radiator, even as their own innate musical instincts bang on the steel exterior.
