Review Summary: You can’t refuse love like this, it is criminal
The term “anti-”, in the ancient Greek, did not always denote opposition. “To be in place of”, “in exchange of”, the counterfeit, the false imitation. In eschatology, the Anti-Christ especially, isn’t necessarily written as merely oppositional. Jamie Stewart’s relationship with pop, with noise rock, their mode of experimentation, all tend to muddy any sense of pure opposition. This funhouse mirror held up to a world of pure self-absorption, a world that, for Stewart, rocks on a see-saw of perversion and vaporous sublimity. The results, throughout this career, have rocked along the axes of self-hatred, violence, repulsion, and allure, and the uneven, unpinnable quality is the product and the price of admittance. Where pop is the pure exterior,the movements of desire crystallized and refracted, Xiu Xiu’s anti-pop crystallizes and refracts an interior of desire, a binge, glorious in its own right, of the loathing and suffering that clings to desire.
So,
13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips. It’s been mentioned in a few places that
The Downward Spiral is a connecting point, but the edge, in its pure posturing, has little of the self-consciousness of young Reznor; its angst more tangible and deeply rooted. Despite that connection, it may be, in fact, Stewart’s most self-affirming work yet, and their most accessible since
Forget. This is hardly Porter Robinson, though. Just because Xiu Xiu have shed some of their more manic qualities, and just because they’ve dropped the Nosferatu-horror-act of
Ignore Grief doesn’t mean this is anything less than pure Xiu Xiu. We’re still getting discordant organs over bubbling noises, freak-out drum machines, strings, castrato warbling, excrement, glitter, and on and on and on. We also get some of the most straightforward bangers of Xiu Xiu’s career. When Common Loon opens with a goofy Link Wray-style guitar lick before blasting into bright, fuzzy synths, when the swaggering blare of Veneficium cuts in, when the wide-eyed industrial pop menace of Sleep Blvd. gives way to the breathless pulse of T.D.F.T.W (which, with its syncopated beat and frantic, ecstatic delivery gives more than a hint of Wovenhand), we feel as though we’ve got something far more tightly constructed than the viscous fluidity and sloppy mania of past Xiu Xiu releases. This is Stewart under control, anchored, directed, pointing his energy towards songcraft, more than a violent vomiting of self expression. The anti-pop artist has done some tempering, has made his work concise, blade-like, and, in a sense, pure.
The Stiletto, the object as title, the frightfully specific product catalog description, according to Stewart simply a knife that he happens to like, feels totemic, the tension of the knife’s presence, the description of its attributes (13” bison horn grip), luxury and craftsmanship in the body of a weapon evoking violence and eros with a grace that makes Deftones look like an acne pocked homecoming date. The attraction of the title for Jamie is in the relative uselessness of the knife as a tool of violence, and the futility of violence itself. There’s a paradox of power, the power of violence rendered impotent, a glittering, useless tool, only existing in order to be admired. Once again, we arrive at Stewart, and the outlook he’s been spewing since the beginning.
Jamie Stewart, the histrionic, messy bitch, the inverted ghost of the pop world, black mirror, Bloody Mary, the exhibitionist, the auto-exorcist, is now cranking out banger after extroverted, relatively straightforward banger? In Berlin no less? You’ve gone and inverted the Berlin sojourn now, king, god bless, taken Bowie’s dissociated apotheosis. The mask is flipped, we’ve all bought our laser engraved, spring assisted commemorative Xiu Xiu knives, and their inutility is their raison d’etre, they’re all ready to gather dust, shiny and iridescent on our shelves or in our kitchen drawers. But that doesn’t change the simple fact of the object itself, that this object’s intent, if a distorted image of its original purpose, doesn’t have something that deeply wants excavating. The relative polish on
13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips doesn’t conceal its edge. If knowledge, as Foucault claims, is for cutting, then so, certainly is art. So, cut away, Xiu Xiu. Cut away.
