Xiu Xiu
Angel Guts: Red Classroom
Polyvinyl; 2014
By Ian Cohen; February 5, 2014
Almost 10 years ago to the day, Jamie Stewart released his most purposefully disturbing record as Xiu Xiu: not Knife Play, not Fag Patrol, and not Dear God, I Hate Myself. That would be Fabulous Muscles, which placed Stewart’s NC-17 lyrical deviance within the context of streamlined, not-quite pop songs and, as a result, gave us something more unsettling than his cover art—a Xiu Xiu record presumably meant for mass consumption. It’s remained his most accessible work and not coincidentally, his strongest. But its bold extroversion has also made it an outlier amongst his overall oeuvre: in the time since, individual Xiu Xiu songs have been shocking, disgusting, catchy, affecting, and kinda hilarious. But taking the longview, the project itself has become kinda predictable. Or at least reliable, as Xiu Xiu albums of nearly equal quality arrive to nearly equally positive reviews like clockwork—if La Forêt or The Air Force didn’t convince you, I don’t see how Women As Lovers or Always were going to do the trick. Point being that Xiu Xiu still makes potent, interesting art. The unconverted just need a new way in.
Angel Guts: Red Classroomacknowledges that possibility, bearing the promise of being the most dark and bleak Xiu Xiu album, but those claims read like “new tastier recipe!” on a can of Chunky Soup: an unquantifiable way of enhancing what it was supposed to be in the first place. You won’t mistake Angels Guts as the work of anyone else, but after a curiously tame Nina Simone covers album, Stewart wisely places himself in the lineage of depraved art-rock titans equally drawn to literal and figurative human bondage. He opened for Swans during their tour for The Seer, which is a tremendous cosign: you need to be antagonistic and artistically pure enough to appeal to Michael Gira, but you also need the balls to open for the most intimidating live band on earth playing an autoharp by yourself. Stewart acquitted himself tremendously and Thor Harris returns the favor by contributing percussion to Angel Guts, most notably the bells on “El Naco” which recall his own work on the doomsaying “Avatar”. On a macro level, you might hear Angel Guts capturing the same juxtaposition of dissonance, decaying beauty, and eerie calm of The Seer and condensing it into three-minute pieces on its instrumental bookends.
While Stewart’s more-emo-than-emo, hypothermic quavering is as sui generis as ever, you can also hear echoes of Scott Walker’s defiled operatics during the dramatic rise of “Stupid in the Dark” and “A Knife in the Sun”. Most often, you hear Suicide; for people who weren’t “there” the first time around and only know them as a namedrop, that means a twisted metal cacophony of rudimentary drum machines, industrial squealing, and hypnotic synth lines. Co-opting that sound makes you no more outre than Sky Ferreira, though the metallic poisoning pervades the entirety of Angel Guts rather than one song, making subtle diversions even more challenging to spot: avian swoops punctuating the nearly psychedelic “Lawrence Liquors,” “Adult Friends”’s juddering techno, even calypso during “Bitter Melon”.
Of course, if we’re going to talk about the “bleakest” Xiu Xiu album to date, it’s probably going to be a result of the lyrics. You won’t be disappointed. As far as the source of Angel Guts: Red Classroom’s title, I hate to quote the press release, but we’d be better off assuming neither of us has previously seen the “Japanese erotic noir” film of the same name, which explored “racialized sex, double suicide, double penetration, criminality, fear of physical harm.” You know, like a Xiu Xiu album. This is most likely the inspiration behind “Black Dick”, which could’ve also been called “white ass,” “yellow titties”, or “brown pussy,” except Stewart chose the one lyric that makes for the most Xiu Xiu-ian chorus: “black DICK! DICK! DICK! DICK! DICK!” On first glance, it’s more eye-rolling or “shocking” than actually shocking, giving you the impression that Stewart is simply playing to type. Of course, he knows this and manages to be pretty funny about it during the whole thing, describing the accoutrements of the aforementioned as “one cheek like Jesus/ the other like Hey-Zeus,” and “one ball like a skull/ the other ball like Bullet Bill,” so now you have to grasp the dichotomy of Stewart juggling Japanese “Roman porno” fare and Super Mario Wii on a Friday night.
The laughs aren’t new, nor are they isolated, as “Cinthya’s Unisex” and “Adult Friends” actually find Stewart’s horrifyingly grim outlook appropriate for the subject of aging and desperate hookups, although spiked with the requisite S&M (“you reduced your breasts to a more tasteful size D/ when I touch them it is like a lobster crawling under my arm”). What does constitute a new wrinkle is the physical sense of place, as opposed to the general squalor pervading Xiu Xiu’s music. Though the sounds and themes of Angel Guts gives one the impression of New York in the “glorious shithole” 80s, it’s actually Stewart’s “Los Angeles album,” as he recently relocated across the country after four years in North Carolina.
But this isn’t like Liars’ Sisterworld, a cultural critique from a cantankerous transplant. Stewart drew inspiration from a gang-infested, horrifying part of Los Angeles he “unwittingly” moved to, reflected in the true crime stories of “Stupid In The Dark” and the poisoned hysterics of “El Naco” (“ants in the kimchi!/a worm in my stool!”). And yet, something about his plausible deniability gets to why Angel Guts can prick the surface without getting under your skin. How could he not know what he was getting into? We’re talking about a touring musician who has the curiosity to find the deepest recesses of Japanese erotic noir, you don’t think he could check Westside Rentals?
As a result, Angel Guts can occasionally feel like stunt journalism, and you wonder how much skin Stewart has in the game, so to speak. Or whether the move really sparked much new at all: the apocalyptic suicide fantasy of “New Life Immigration” feels like a continuation of Fabulous Muscles’ “Little Panda McElroy”, yet another Xiu Xiu love song that essentially expresses the emotion as “I hate everyone but you,” which is, in fact, a lyric from “Cinthya’s Unisex.”
Which is to say that Angel Guts is yet another strong, occasionally frustrating record restrained by Stewart’s consistency. Xiu Xiu albums feel safe, not in the sense of being conservative, but protective—a place where you can shout “black DICK! DICK! DICK! DICK!” without any sense of judgment or risk, even if you don’t know why you’re doing so in the first place. And that can be a little disappointing, considering how vital Stewart can and should be. Outcasts surely discover Xiu Xiu every year, and he’s become a touchstone for his peers—he’s collaborated with Grouper, been covered by Shearwater, acknowledged as a main influence by Perfume Genius, and you can hear echoes of his confrontational, confessional songwriting in Baths’ Obsidian and Majical Cloudz’s Impersonator, two of last year’s most unique and compelling singer-songwriter records. But those artists are bringing the drama to an audience who might not otherwise expect it, and that feels more daring than Angel Guts, which comes off like a closed circuit, another satisfying way to meet Stewart on his own terms. He’s even better when he tries to meet us halfway.