Xiu Xiu
Issue #29
The Airforce (5RC)
By Sam Scranton
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Richard Hell wrote a tune called “Time” about the impossibility of writing a song that is “really, really real.” It seems that Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart took this as a personal challenge and set out to disprove him. On -2003’s A Promise, his lyrics have the quality of a teenage diary intimating suicidal desires, rock fandom, gender ambiguity, and everyday struggles through mundane but concrete and vivid language. The candor of those songs and revelations of the super intimate are combined with a tear-choked and door-slammed delivery that make his music unsettling and powerful. Xiu Xiu goes beyond the voyeuristic and shocking pleasures that songs of this type might elicit and gives us really, really real portraits of Jamie Stewart.
Unfortunately, on albums since A Promise, including Stewart’s latest with Caralee McElroy, The Airforce, these tropes fall a little flat and fail to convey what they once did. Just as when one repeats a word over and over and finds that the word loses its meaning, Xiu Xiu’s histrionics cease to carry any weight after a few albums. His pained and hushed vocal style that once was the vehicle for his honesty now smells of affectation. Lines such as “Love begins and love ends” on “P.J. In The Streets” might have previously worked but now seem vacuous. Well, that line might never have meant anything, but it seems particularly bad now.
Though Stewart’s vocals lack the power they once had, the album as a whole is not a poor one. There are many redeeming elements, namely the collaboration between producer Greg Saunier and Stewart. Opener “Buzz Saw” combines the awesomest, sparsest drum beat and most delicate marimbas provided by Saunier with Stewart’s desolate piano. “Boy Soprano” and “Hello From Eau Claire” feature some of the fun and ridiculous sounds that Saunier explored on Green Cosmos with his band Deerhoof, yet work well with the melancholy of Xiu Xiu’s songs. Not since their previous collaboration on Xiu Xiu’s “Hives Hives,” an ecstatic, triumphant anthem about AIDS and wanting to die, has joy and despair been combined so successfully.
Richard Hell believed that authenticity is impossible and that identity is artifice and creation. And for a while, it seemed that Xiu Xiu might have proved him wrong, that honesty and really, really real songs were not only an admirable goal but a possible one. Time revealed that Xiu Xiu’s identity is as much a construct as any other persona. Fortunately his music is good enough to work beyond failure at grasping the really, really real.
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