I do understand why some people have an issue with avant-garde art. You stand there, in the big room of a museum, in front of an object that seems somewhat formless or maybe even ridiculous in its corporeal qualities and are expected to somehow respond to it emotionally. Maybe you ponder if you can compare it to something else, or if it elicits some kind of buried memory from your childhood – anything. And you just don’t. Without any context, it’s just a ridiculous shape.
But in that also lies the issue with how art is expected to be received: oftentimes the individual pieces exist in a dialogue that is outside of the museum’s confined rooms, or even its own body. Nam June Paik is a good example of this. Like a cyberpunk Andy Warhol, Paik has used the cold cathode ray glow of television screens to form installations, images and moving statues. Even if you can relate to the power his installations, you need to understand the cultural qualities of religion, performance and political influence of media. Out of that context, it forms an image that says a lot about the world his audience departed from; how they watch TV, how they relate to ideas of god and the spirits, how they engage with other bodies.
So in short, the avant-garde is not so much to relate to a piece, but to engage in a dialogue with it – learn its language. Observe its forms. Behold its body. If we reject that process, we simply take from art. And we miss the most personal of it: the identity of its artist.
Xiu Xiu have found themselves multiple times in this uncomfortable position of critical rejection. For over 20 years, Jamie Stewart’s strange project has denied any classification or simplicity. Each new project is a unique chapter of the artist’s story, often committing to strict conceptual limitations and harrowing narrative arcs. The individual albums of Xiu Xiu thus become like the periods of painters, like Miro or Picasso, who challenged themselves by reconfiguring the form of their modus. Part autobiography, these albums can range from pleasant atmospheric pieces all the way to completely indigestible power electronics. Focusing on Stewart’s mental and emotional struggles as well as queer perspectives (Stewart is openly bisexual), they dip into poetry, drag, horror, nursery rhymes and snuff.
Thus, each new Xiu Xiu album demands to know: what’s it gonna be this time? Who can I be now? 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips (from here on out referred to simply as Stiletto) announces itself as designer object – sharp, expensive, a piece of handmade art in knife form (swiftly referring to the group’s debut, Knife Play). The band is still a trio, with new addition drummer David Kendrick staying over from last year’s punishing Ignore Grief. But where that record was a harrowing post-industrial hellscape, Stiletto is… a rock album.
Well, that’s a first. I can’t even count how many records Xiu Xiu have (depends on what you want to exclude and include), and so far they only touched mainstream twice, with The Air Force (2006) and FORGET (2017). There have been occasional outlying moments – such as legendary climax “I Luv the Valley Oh!” – but Xiu Xiu have never really rocked for the duration of an album.
Coming packaged in a reflective mirror-foil cover, Stiletto almost announces itself on the level of art rock monolith as we know from The Velvet Underground. There’s a new appeal here the band has never embraced before, employing Kendrick to frame their writing in sharp rhythms, guitars interacting in melodic dialogue and Stewart sharpening his vocal melodies in a way where they become groovy.
“Maestro One Chord” is a brilliant example of this, with Kendrick’s percussion feeling like an architectural skeleton for the organ and vocals to inhabit. Remove them, and the track would sound like a ghost wandering a haunted house – Kendrick transforms it to the observations of a nihilistic office worker in a brutalist structure. The lyrics, as usual for Stewart, are both cryptic and incredibly intuitive. “A shudder of discovery, floating in space / A denial of submission, floating in the space / A disbeliever, accountable to the crematory / A slap in the face, flying through space”. Rebellion and unrest meet death and despair, while distorted and cut up vocals bring a hint of sci-fi horror Coil found on Musick to Play in the Dark.
Lead single “Common Loon” is a punk rock anthem that could almost feel related to Placebo’s early works. The sexy lyrics highlight how libidinal the track functions, as Stewart refers to the protagonist: “They are a freak, and cool / Impermanent candy”. His disillusioned view of lovers as consumable objects has persisted since “Fabulous Muscles”, finding a threatening ambivalence in symbolic equation of lube, balloons and candy.
“T.F.F.T.W.” is the thematic opposite, a strangely dance-punk song that opens with the lines “In everyone’s life, there is only one person / Whose name can be called out at the moment of death / And for me, that name is yours”. Stewart and Angela Seo duet for much of the song, while Kendrick delivers a shockingly physical beat, something that could be found on a Led Zeppelin track. There’s a scary quality to Stewart’s convictions of admission here that makes this one of his punchiest, most memorable songs. His protagonist doesn’t quite reveal if the admission is one of love or hate – are the feelings returned? Is this a love song, or a curse? Elsewhere, Stewart allows himself some reprieve, as on the icy “Sleep Blvd.”: “I was afraid of a darkness / I was afraid of lightning / They don’t concern me anymore / Crawl into the duffle bag / Crawl into Crisco disco”.
There’s a maturity in much of the lyricism here, acknowledging that analysis is as important as allowing closure. There’s many hints within the lyrics of queer culture, at times only glimpsed in what’s left unsaid, other times almost coming off satirical, as familiar from the grotesque lengths Stewart’s protagonists have gone to in the past.
Maybe that’s why “Arp Omni” is the most striking track. It stands apart on Stiletto: orchestral and tense, the ballad opens the album on an eerie note: “I have done almost nothing right / My entire adult life / But having dared to touch the fire with you / Breaks the chain of my being nothing too”. The track feels like the love song to a departed lover who stayed but for a brief moment. Embracing an urgent tone, Stewart rises to the quality of Scott Walker’s haunting work – infinitely touching.
So is Stiletto the best Xiu Xiu? Hard to say, because there’s so much here that is divided from what the band usually explores. And not every song works – “Veneficum” is almost too goofy in its new wave, its melody contrasting too strongly with the track’s dark subject matter, while Bobby Bland’s complex audio collage almost seems part of a different project.
Fact remains, though, that the density of the record’s production allows listeners to come back repeatedly, finding hidden instrumentation that’s been clever mixed into the background. There’s a compositional mastery at play that many of their critics denied Xiu Xiu’s barebones electronic work. And the songs reverberate stronger than those on the group’s more recent albums.
Yet at the same time, Stiletto isn’t as epic as Girl with Basket of Fruit or Ignore Grief, and it’s not as varied as Fabulous Muscles. It feels at times like an experiment to imagine a different Xiu Xiu; one that find themselves on the top of year end lists, that are played in rock clubs, that reside in New York and wear shades. In this gesture, they’ve become more approachable, but also more distant. Lyrically, this is more La Forêt or A Promise – providing very personal rumination on the self – than the fairytale-like horror stories they explored in the last few years, supporting the thesis that this is the group imagining an alternative reality. More Friedkin than Lynch and more Lou than Scott, Stiletto slashes the canvas open: the cover art is a mirror after all. It asks questions to its listener – the movement of his body, the expression on his face –, and provides no answers. This is rock music, played in dark rooms.
