This is a log of my experience of listening to Xiu Xiu's new album, Eraserhead Xiu Xiu, for the first time, song by song in chronological order as they're played from the album.
Viento
Scrapy plastic/metallic objects, compressed sound, dragged over a surface near a mic. Distorted. Train whistle. Drone-like harmonies. Minor-key synths. Horns in the distance? Sounds like compressed air is blown through a hose.
Bass. Bass. Controlled sounds.
Back to calm. The scrapy objects go on and on; now they sound as though they make sense: there's a rhythm, a pattern. Is this a thing inside a hamster wheel? Pause; everything pauses briefly, then continues.
It would be easy to mess this up. Xiu Xiu manage to make something great of this. It's fucking great.
Carnival-y synths appear. It all reminds me of Conrad Schnitzler, the brilliant synth-music pioneer.
The synth melody that appears reminds me of old-school German electronics experiments; not Stockhausen, more Tangerine Dream and Faust. It's all good. Xiu Xiu aren't messing about. This isn't stole in any way.
Burning sine-notes, bass-y and mid-freq stuff.
Synths appear, more high-frequency than the bass; shearing stuff. Train sounds?
Sleep Synth
Mouth drill. Pig grunts. A machine that powers electricity.
Suddenly: Jamie Stewart's voice that sings In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song).
You've got your good thing I've got mine
Jamie's voice is sensational: the timbre and vibrato is perfectly paired with a synth that sounds like a synth, meaning that sounds are created not with the intention to try and trick the listener into thinking it's the real deal: wooden polyphonic flute sounds.
A recurring cling. Sounds like a triangle.
Bottles are thrown into a plastic bin and smashed.
After five minutes, the song fades into silence. There's a glitch. Then: repressed demonic squeals in the background, an old synth in the foreground playing bass-y notes. I can't think of another band this side of the millennium that could pull off this stuff and make it interesting. I usually don't listen to albums more than once but Xiu Xiu I listen to over and over again.
Another pause, seven minutes in. Fluttering. Buzzings. I feel like I'm in a German sweatshop.
Shut up! Shut up!
I think Angela Seo's shouting. Over and over again, going into screaming.
Tetra
Grunts from two different voices. A light drill. Distorted metallic filter over voices. A square-wave synth sound. A shrill and vibrating background sound.
Something sounds like it's bubbling and burning at the same time. Water and flame. How is this possible.
Nearly two minutes in, a distorted showtune starts playing while the first sounds play in the background, even more distorted. What sounds like a 1980s Casio synth, distorted, starts playing over the showtune and bubbling/scraping.
It works.
Waves of synths. Synths in waves. Wobbles. Near-arpeggio. Whooshes. Stuff being dropped and pulled and let go.
I imagine this is how metallic boxes that were partly made of paper would sound if they were dropped in David Lynch's home.
Silence.
Sounds of something...plastic with small edges being pulled over...teeth, perhaps? A mouth used to modulate sounds.
A deep container with a mic five meters away. Reverb, Electricity used to start something. A heavy drill that's operated?
Sounds like a small mbira being played.
Warblings in the background. Voices. Hums, grunts, near-moans. An elongated scream or an electronic sound that goes high-pitched? Impossible for me to tell. Rumblings.
I'm somehow reminded of Katja Brunner's brilliant theatre play Die Hölle ist auch nur eine sauna ('Hell is just a sauna', my translation): life told by a Fritzl child in a basement.
Okay, Paul!
Steampipe
A rattle. Air through a hose. The rattle adds bass. There's another rattle, higher in frequency, not irritating. Pipes. Flanger effect. Background rumbles that become the foreground. Echo.
Pneumatic air pushed and stopped. A toddler's crib being played on? An old synth played by a good player as though they've rarely played a keyboard before; rattles; coughs, all distorted; the cough fades away.
Smashy Smashy
As 'Steampipe' fades into this track, an electronic bass drum leads us into...distorted shrieks. Repetition. Cut-up shrieks, played as though they were chords.
Ether
Air blowing gently yet steadily. The volume increases. Distorted electronic stream. Pulsating background...something. A drum? A room? Steps? Impossible for me to tell or know.
Synth chords that might not be chords at all.
The pulse goes on.
In Heaven
A ding ding ding ding sound starts. A single triangle sound; perhaps it's a triangle. Or a crystal glass.
The wooden-flute synth again. A reprise of what is heard in 'Sleep Synth'. Instrumental start. The 'triangle' is doubled. Chimes. Harmony.
The triangle goes away.
Only the dark wooden flute is there. Jamie sings the lyrics to 'In Heaven'.
These are the only three instruments: synth, triangle, human voice.
Then: breaking of bottles in a plastic bin, smashing them up with a pole. Crashes.
Niklas's thoughts after having heard the album for the first time
Are Xiu Xiu human? Jamie and Angela have created something very special, an oasis of music in the age of slop. This is some guttural, thought-through shit!
I feel as though I've listened to vestiges pared from a great thing; Xiu Xiu have made something truly spectacular from Eraserhead; this is great art. Guttural forms are gathered and made to become something big.
Xiu Xiu is really one of the most important, fun, great, and funny bands of our time. This isn't funny but it's a testament of their greatness. They've made a lot of music; or, have they merely music that's great and happened to get released fairly often? The level of quality of Xiu Xiu's stuff is relatively sky-high, so much that I've yet to fault any of their latest twenty records.
This is actually fun, in a way. I like how the child-like or childish sounds are both unsettling and...fun? I think the 'fun component' is there somehow!
This album could easily have become woo-let's-make-a-spooky-and-gloomy-album nonsense but not thanks to Xiu being mf'n Xiu. Get in! It's the only way (which means I've just pissed on this post, but that's fine).