“The one constant in the band will be that we’ll always write about things that are real,” Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu said recently. “When we started the band we literally sat down and decided we were going to do that. So, no, none of the songs are made up.”
Considering the graphic content of the California-birthed avant-pop group’s music, that can be a bit tough to swallow. Xiu Xiu’s songs read like bloody diary entries scrawled in the Necronomicon, stories of horrible violence and fear and aching lonliness laid over synth-pop dance beats. It’s certainly an acquired taste, but ten years into its life, Jamie Stewart’s musical brainchild is still going strong.
The band recently released their ninth album in ten years, the ominously titled Always. It’s an assault on both the ears and the mind, unburdened by expectations of normalcy. Stewart’s list of influences was appropriately esoteric.
“[I listened to] a lot of Krautrock—not really the main stuff, like Can and Amon Düül II, but the beat-driven stuff, like Neu! and Harmonia and La Dusseldorf,” he said. “Morton Feldman a lot, a lot of really late ’50s early ’60s experimental electronic stuff from Brazil, and, you know, Top 40 stuff.”
Despite the experimental snarl perpetually present, it would be tough to deny that Xiu Xiu has always had a toe in the proverbial water of pop.
In addition to newer cuts and old staples, the band has been delving into a series of covers for their recent live shows, notably Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop.”
“[That] one actually kind of came up spontaneously,” he said. “We were on tour in Europe recently, [and] we were at this one horrible, horrible show, and we had been listening to the song in the van a lot, and we said, ‘Fuck it, let’s try to do it’. The show was going over so bad anyways, the song would either go over well or be a total disaster. And the show was already a total disaster.”
The band has also been known to cover the Joy Division/New Order single “Ceremony,” Rihanna and “Under Pressure” with Swan’s Michael Gira (possibly the most perfect pairing one could ever imagine).
“Almost invariably [the cover] is a tribute to that song, a song that we really, really love,” Stewart said. “It’s not an attempt to sort of remake the song in our own image, that’s not our motivation for doing it, injecting our own history into it. It’s just kind of our way of saying thank you to the song.”
The band returns to Madison for the second time May 18, playing a double headliner bill with one man time-machine Dirty Beaches.
“We have a lot of the same influences, and I think we both depend on music in a very similar [way],” Stewart said of his tour-mate. “Also, he has an incredibly good haircut, and I have an incredibly good haircut.”
“Angela,” he added, “who is driving the car right now, also would like me to point out the fact that [Dirty Beaches] is Asian, and she is Asian [laughs] and they want to completely overwhelm the underground music scene with the Asian power of music superiority.”
Stewart not only asked The Daily Cardinal to include this quote, but also to publish it in yellow ink. So, there’s that.
Given the highly autobiographical nature of their work, we couldn’t help but ask if Xiu Xiu would ever flirt with happier content. Stewart replied grimly, “Well, I guess that depends on the state of the world”.
So, not any time soon, then?
“No, probably not,” he laughed heartily and sincerely.
