Konsertrecension: Xiu Xius music beats in all directions, anytime

Xiu Xiu do to say the least bizarre music. An attempt to profile them sounds something like this: Frontman Jamie Stewart goes in the footsteps from the 70 talsartrock that The Residents and Suicide, turn to it with industrial influences à la Nine Inch Nails, and mixes it all with a kind of hypersensitive emokvalitet sprung from Elliott Smith. Beautiful, extreme and difficult to get to.

But it is only a fragment of the truth. A better definition reads: on the Basis of its extremely broken childhood, writes Stewart songs about sex, humiliation, destructiveness and war. To quote the band's constant ombesörjare, the trend-conscious musiksajten Pitchfork: Xiu Xius best songs is like watching someone self-harm in real-time.

in which direction it wants, whenever it falls in, without a care for anything beyond his own story. Jamie Stewart goes up on stage completely silent and focused, gurgles water and staring at the pedals. He looks scared, as if he did this for the first time. The opposite of a rock star.

But in the songs, he becomes free. Vulnerable ”Normal love”, a recognition that Stewart would like to have the vaniljkärlek he always låtsats despise, clinging to a solitary trembling gitarrton. Then the opposite: With so much roaring dissonance as three people can muster returns ”Support our troops oh!” sickening dödsscener from the war in Iraq.

Xiu Xiu is the master of sonically illustrate, rather than just compose music, stories. With the help of its extreme dynamic width, they build a bridge between literature and music.

Therefore, it also becomes meaningless when the texts do not measure up. ”Pumpkin attack on mom and daddy” is done in a childish poetry slam-variant to be humorous and dangerous, but is just empty provocation. It is, unfortunately, not alone. At times it becomes chaotic larmandet the changed indiemannens counterpart to the long, pointless guitar solos. It fills no purpose.

As the tour is find the back. The closing ”Sad pony guerilla girl” returns to the trembling alone the guitar and tells us about the unequal love that still is just love. I leave Fasching shaken up. And in some strange way uplifted.

Read more music reviews of Noah Soderberg, for example, about how Napalm Death uses their extreme music to also say something.