“Piled in a corner // Everything we are”
I’ve been trying to listen to more artists that count as “experimental” over the last couple of years now. One of my earliest forays was Black Midi’s jazzy, progressive Cavalcade. And as of recently, I’ve been loving acts like Fire-Toolz and Gezan. Both very different from Black Midi, but the core experimental sound is a throughline. My tastes don’t welcome every sound under this umbrella, but the right mix and execution can really make me love a record. This has lead to me Xiu Xiu who are releasing their most abstract release to date, Ignore Grief, which is the band’s 13th studio album. Thus, not only are they veterans of the sound, but they are dark and disturbing, and with elements of avant-garde too.
There is also some framing that is fairly important when listening to and processing this album. “This is a record of halves” the band states.
“Angela Seo sings on half the record. Jamie Stewart sings on half the record. Half the songs are experimental industrial. Half of the songs are experimental modern classical. Half of it is real. Half of it is imaginary.”
Regarding the last part, Xiu Xiu is also on record stating that the album was motivated by various horrendous experiences that have happened to five people that Xiu Xiu are aware of, such as a child who was sold into prostitution by his mother. The band is not just using that as an inspiration for a dark conceptual story, they themselves are not shutting their eyes or turning away from this horror, that would be “yet a further act of destruction.” They are acknowledging it and processing it and wrote an album to attempt to generate a shred of true empathy via this artistic output. I think this is a noble, respectful cause, as more of the world needs to stare into the face of horror, rather than blissfully ignoring it. The real half of the album attempts to turn what has happened to these five people into anything other than trauma. The imaginary songs are the band’s way of processing their grief and passing through it.
With that framework in mind, the first note of the album comes as no surprise. “The Real Chaos Cha Cha Cha” starts with a droning noise as other unsettling sound effects are intertwined. The one main motif of this track is the sound of a broken, dilapidated toy. Also present is an electronic alarm sample that does a lot of heavy lifting on the instrumental front. The song seems to come to a halt about 1 minute shy of the run time, but then there’s a stripped back spoken section from someone saying, “I am candley” and “I am looking for candle in the wind.” I’ve gotten the impression that this song is from the perspective of a toy, hence this part, the broken toy sound effect, and the lyric “I am not the first person you have stuffed in the trash.” Angela Seo does a great job of delivery for this track, though I do wish the vocals had a tad more presence in the mix.
“666 Photos of Nothing” starts with just the most unsettling harmonium playing I have ever heard, and likely will ever hear. Given the subject of the track, it is fitting. This cut seems to be the band’s response to the child sold into prostitution. Naturally, it is discordant, as any sort of musical processing of that fact would lead to something this bleak. As a listener, I wish I found the instrumental accompaniment here more interesting. Or at least, I wish the track were not the album’s second track, as it seems more like an interlude. This brings me to the thesis of this review, which is that I am having trouble rating, scoring, or even having an opinion on much of the material here. More than an album, Ignore Grief is an exercise for the band in making something out of the atrocities that have stuck with them. However that output manifests, it is not for me to say whether the sound is good; the output is the only possible sound it could have been, because it is true to their grief. As listeners, we are granted a peak into this output since Xiu Xiu have the platform for it.
Instrumentally, something like within “Esquerita, Little Richard” grabs me much more. There is an eclectic array of electronic tones carried by hurried programmed drums. Angela’s use of repetition of the album’s title, Ignore Grief, absolutely hits here, too, and you can truly hear the hopelessness and confusion of the statement.
Then there’s “Maybae Baeby” which is a song where “the singer’s viewpoint is of a young person hiding in a fantastical conversation with a tarantula in order to escape a physically abusive parent.” As someone whose main goal in life is to never be within a couple meters of a tarantula, this is a wild amount of induced isolation to find solace with a tarantula, and that does add to how the song impacts me. The vocal effect on top of Angela’s delivery of “chuga chuga chuga” here is a nice touch. Further, the slow build of the bass and rattles really adds to the eeriness of the track. Then, the song ends with a horror filled shrilling sound. As hard as it is to process this album, this is one of my favorite tracks.
“Pahrump” is a poignant reflection of one of the horrors committed on one of the subjects of the album. This cut is also perhaps my favorite Jamie Stewart-lead song. The various strings at the beginning are a nice contrast to a lot of what has come prior, but there’s still a slightly eerie tone to it. A lyrical passage towards its end hits especially hard for me, in both imagery and empathy for the subject:
“The rain tambourine off a thousand empty liquor bottles in the courtyard.
When your sons grow up to never place flowers there
You did this to yourself, is all they will choose to remember.”
There is an amount of satisfaction in seeing this viewpoint, that once the agent of horrors is dead and buried, the only thing they leave behind is a legacy that thinks upon them with disdain. To get that presented so poignantly in this track allows me some sense of peace.
“Dracula Parrot, Moon Moth” is an intense cut, and evidently one of the songs that is on the “experimental modern classical” half. It starts with both some classical beautiful strings, something along the likes of which you’d hear on Kevin Penkin’s Made in Abyss OST. There are, of course, more sweeping horror-filled strings added in too. This song also makes use of some sparse horns in the middle that add a lot of ambiance. Then, the track closes with Jamie’s vocals approaching near opera levels of grandiosity.
I do really like “Brother Creeper”, too. There an indigenous plucking sound consistent through the song. Combined with the panicked synths, it makes for a very interesting soundscape. Not to mention, Angela’s vocals are actually brought even more into the background, but with an added effect on top of them, almost like she’s speaking from a dream. It comes into the foreground for just a moment and she says, “A scalping knife is just a dull knife.” Very unsettling, yet effective.
During the extended eight-minute closer, we do get both Angela and Jamie on a track together for the first time on Ignore Grief. The lyrics are split up into 5 parts, and each is more so a poem than lyrics for one song. I am very curious as to how a song like this gets written. How to place the poems, what is connecting them, and how to deliver the poems both vocally and accompanied with certain dark ambient sounds? I have many questions as to how an album like this gets written, but as I mentioned, this is strictly a band’s output of grief given their skills at twisted production styles and dark song writing. It is an extremely interesting and weird listen because of this, and I cannot, in good conscience, give a numerical rating to something that, in my eyes, spawned organically.
Ignore Grief will be available this Friday, March 3rd via Polyvinyl Records, and you can find pre-orders for the album here.