Xiu Xiu’s switchblade pop
13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips might be the group’s most approachable album yet, but it cuts as deep as their darkest material.
Knowing Xiu Xiu is a difficult endeavor. The sheer size of their catalog — now 17 solo LPs and dozens more collaborative projects strong — doesn’t quite encapsulate what makes their body of work so hard to comprehend as a whole. Far more confounding is the fact that no two Xiu Xiu eras are alike. Their sound has fluctuated wildly over the past 22 years, though always retaining an unsettled ethos.
From the clangorous percussion and howled vocals of their debut album Knife Play to the soft, writerly cuts from its follow-up, A Promise; the unhinged dance tracks on 2004’s Fabulous Muscles to the chilling quietude of Creepshow, a 2006 collab tape with Grouper; the open skies of Dear God, I Hate Myself (2010) to the caged-animal chaos of Angel Guts: Red Room; and, more recently, the playful spirit of their 2021 duets album Oh No to the eviscerating horrorscapes of last year’s Ignore Grief, moments of easy comfort are tough to find.
The only overarching constant across this scattered collection of curiosities has been Jamie Stewart’s ghastly, tortured presence — alternately tragic and deranged, always terrifying.
Led by Stewart since the group’s 2002 inception in San Jose, Xiu Xiu are currently a trio, also including longtime member Angela Seo (producer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist) and recent addition David Kendrick (percussion,). 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips, the second full-length from this iteration of the band, is out now via Polyvinyl.
Mixed by the ultra-prolific John Congleton and inspired by a move from the band’s longstanding Los Angeles home base to Berlin, 13” Frank Beltrame is their best pop album to date. Named for a large switchblade Stewart actually owns, the record captures the band’s ability to be anthemic and lush without losing their sinister edge.
“Common Loon” and “Veneficium,” two of the project’s pre-release offerings, illustrate this capacity as well as any songs in Xiu Xiu’s catalog.
Remove the hoarseness of Stewart’s voice, the sandpaper fuzz on their guitar, the militant force of Kendrick’s drums, and the grit of Seo’s production and Congleton’s mix, and you’ll find the former track sounds a bit like the Modest Mouse song from the AmEx commercial.
Disregard the panic-attack static, squabbling synth and guitar lines, and insistent organ drone undergirding the latter single, and you’ll notice its core refrain has more in common with Franz Ferdinand’s cut from Madden 2005 theme than Stewart and Co. might like to admit.
Lyrics are important, too:
“What will you, if and when / I am, someone else / They are a freak, cool / Impermanent, candy,” Stewart whimpers at the start of “Common Loon,” creating a submissive counterpoint to the instrumental’s orgiastic dominance.
“Given all this, why can I go back / How can I stay still, when caught in these acts / The area, the mass and shape, air above the massive space,” they sing near the climax of “Veneficium,” struggling for position against the teeming arrangement. “Oh, what’s to come of this now?”
Elsewhere, 13” Frank Beltrame moves between spells of symphonic sweetness, passages of eerie calm, fleeting moments of clarity, and bouts of unbridled panic, sometimes within a single song. As a narrator, Stewart has often mixed a potent cocktail of pathos and irony. Here, there’s less of the latter.
Over the gorgeous string arrangement of album opener “Arp Omni,” for instance, Stewart sings directly to a lover: “With freckles as sparkling as yours / Who could dare to un-sparkle your dots? / A face as unreasonably adorable as yours / Who could dare to thoughtlessly smudge your cheek?” Later, they up the ante as the mix gets more ethereal: “I have done almost nothing right My entire adult life / But having dared to touch the fire with you.”
On “Maestro One Chord,” they breathily describe interstellar debris as the song hurdles desperately forward like a space shuttle hoping to escape the orbit of a black hole. On “Sleep Blvd.,” they start, nearly whispering, recalling childhood fears of darkness while plucking a tinny guitar string. Then, as the brash synths and drums burst in, Stewart gets onomatopoeic, yelling “boom, boom, boom” above the explosion.
What makes 13” Frank Beltrame so successful as a pop album is less its timbral or tonal softness than Stewart’s own easing; unguarded at last, they sound comfortable swimming with the current rather than fighting it.
13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips closes with “Piña, Coconut & Cherry,” a dense drama exploring the extremes of unrequited love. It’s an unruly affair, underscored by Kendrick’s kitless mix of automated and live percussion. Electrified static mists swarm through chordal walls as Stewart spins their sordid tale, starting in a mode of quiet menace as they flit between metallic monotone and quavering falsetto.
When the track inevitably goes nuclear, they start to scream, repeating “fantasy” until the word is stretched beyond its meaning. In their final throes, they spiral into a bruised, horny, hysterical rant (“I never thought I could love this hard for this long! / It makes me insane! / You can’t refuse love like this / It’s criminal / You must love me, love me, love me!”). In a decisively anti-pop, classically Xiu Xiu move, they blast the whole mess wide open, ravaging all hope of a tidy finish.