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Xiu
Xiu
Stewart and his band
have made a habit of toying with their audience, lacing their
noisy death-disco with black humor and non sequiturs like “This
is the worst vacation ever/I’m going to cut open your forehead
with a roofing shingle.” But their Troubadour set was a
sock to the gut. Stewart howled and trembled like a surgery patient
sans anesthesia while his songs veered from deathly quiet finger-picking
to ferocious blasts of white noise, often in the same song, and
to overwhelming effect. From the opening bars
of Fabulous Muscles “Brian the Vampire,”
McElroy and Stewart managed to make knob-twiddling and 808 programming
look sexy and invigorating. Stewart tore through a cache of instruments,
and seemed especially thrilled with the autoharp he used for “Bog
People,” off his most recent and excellent La Forêt.
“There will always be a headless neck,” he groaned.
“There will always be happiness.” The lyrical contradictions
boiled over in a flurry of panicked strumming and hissing electronics.
McElroy tweaked a Keith Moon-sized wall of gadgetry, and it was
hard to grasp the fact that only two people were making all that
racket. Even when Stewart commandeered an extra snare drum on
“Mousey Toy,” he attacked it with such feral energy
that the backbeat sounded like bullets. By the time he got to
the obligatory sing-along (by Xiu Xiu standards) of “Apistat
Commander,” the wash of noise turned the immense sadness
of the melody into something hopeful for the shell-shocked crowd. Openers Yellow Swans provided something of a warm-up for Xiu Xiu’s ferocity, with a brief set of static and yelping that was all crescendo and zero structure. Ditto for the following act, Scout Niblett, whose PJ Harvey-esque howling never caught on to a good tune. It takes a true songwriter like Stewart to make such brutality meaningful, and Xiu Xiu’s inimitable wallop proved why, in a time when teen soap operas are the new underground, Xiu Xiu are one of the few indie bands that’s still challenging their audience, and rewarding them for it.
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