Event

Xiu Xiu, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, and Dragging an Ox Through Water

Xiu Xiu's music is painfully autobiographical, morose, and histrionic, and is deeply influenced by modern classical, improvisation, British pop and post-punk, techno beats, and, well, the gamelan orchestra.

So what does this sound like? Well Xiu Xiu certainly has more than a little in common with their friends Deerhoof, attacking established pop idioms with a savant's genius, inverting them and reclaiming them in fascinating if sometimes disorienting ways. But note also the presence of Sabbath, Joy Division, and The Smiths in the above list. Even while Xiu Xiu turns the post-punk paradigm on its head, approaching it from a modern composition perspective that results in all kinds of weird cut-ups, juxtapositions, classical instrumentation, and unexpected arrangements, the comic but dead-serious nihilism of the seminal bands referenced by Stewart pervades Xiu Xiu's music. Alternating between screaming tantrums and wavery whispers in a voice that recalls classic goth vocalists like Robert Smith and Peter Murphy, Stewart offers jaw-droppingly personal disclosures that belie the music's more academic influences. This tension between cerebral abstraction and visceral emotion is at the heart of the music's intrigue.