Xiu Xiu

It’s a matter of love, first of all. Xiu Xiu, the Oakland-based project centred around Jamie Stewart and – until she departed last May for Cold Cave – Caralee McElroy, has struggled, from the first, with love – its tongue-tied impossibilities, its sundering and freezing pains, its horrid, scarring legacies, its healing quickenings of the blood. Their songs – always extreme, but more finely sculpted with each album get under the skin like no others’: not only in their sickening honesty – more honest with you than you can be with yourself – but in the way their bizarre soundworlds, their concatenations of mangled electronics, mumbled/shrieked vocals and percussion explosions, invade your physiognomy – mimic bodily meltdown, the scrape of exposed nervous systems. And I half-feel a heart in my mouth when I’ve finally got them in front of me, these ones who’ve meant so much – Stewart, dressed in black from head to toe, hair massacred in an odd Chelsea cut, and Angela Seo, tough and imperturbable behind her keyboards and towering piles of percussion instruments.

The latest Xiu Xiu release, Dear God, I Hate Myself, while not exactly their greatest work, still possesses a fount of great material, which makes up the greater part of their set. Watching the two of them juggle functions to recreate the full-band crunch that made Women As Lovers and Fabulous Muscles so compelling is part of the drama – Angela, on ‘Guantanamo Canto’, lunging to smash at a tree of cymbals, manhandling a wonky drum-machine while making death-rattle noises into the mike, attacking the keyboard as the song enters its coda of cortex-hurting synth-scrawl, while Jamie’s sweat-soaked face against the mike is framed by clacking castanets. They go from near-static reverie to concentrated fiddling with instruments to violences of movement; only before the last song does Jamie speak to the audience, in the amused and earnest mutter familiar from tour-videos.

It’s hard to make much of the new material, what with the unfamiliar lyrics and the vocals mixed so low, although Xiu Xiu’s songcraft seems even further honed – ‘Gray Death’ applies its serrated synth-flourishes to a melodic carriage that might have been purloined from The Smiths. The ‘hits’ land in the solar-plexus with renewed power: a heart-rending ‘Apistat Commander’ – Jamie scaling the vertiginous face of the chorus – appears so near the start they risk peaking early, but they keep up the pace. In between the overpowering cross-cut rhythms is the desolation and fairy-light laments of ‘Gayle Lynn’, subdued by bad mixing. Huge versions of ‘I Luv The Valley Oh!’ and ‘Boy Soprano’ grab me by the throat, detonating in controlled conflagrations of grating electronics and towering choruses of screams, until you realise your own throat is sore from shrieking and your muscles are stringy with fatigue and your heart is grinding against your ribs and you remember what you once believed was love, and you’re prepared to believe it again.