The piano in Jamie Stewart’s living room is out of tune. Pressing down on one of the yellowed keys beneath its flowing scrollwork yields a spooky warble, an echoing vibration around the note that never quite settles into a definite pitch. He notes that piano tuners told him the scuffed, time-darkened upright was beyond help, then shrugs his shoulders. “I know exactly how out of key it is. We just adjust everything else to match.”
There’s a certain fatalism to this remark, but such off-kilter beauty is also Stewart’s specialty. Since 2000, as the driving force behind Oakland’s Xiu Xiu, Stewart has been making music that often provokes the same kind of spine-tingling sensation as his piano’s uncanny distortion of the familiar. Synths alternately smooth as silk or abrasive as sandpaper, combined with the clang of exotic string and percussion instruments and Stewart’s quaveringly intimate vocals, give Xiu Xiu’s sound an eerie, primitive theatricality just this side of madness. Both lovely and disturbing, with lyrics ranging from the esoteric to the obscene, it’s the music made by ordinary objects when humans aren’t there, when voices hum from walls and unliving things come to life.
Stewart and bandmate Caralee McElroy have only a couple hours to talk on this blue, hazy Sunday afternoon before they settle in to a recording session with the third and newest member of the band, Ches Smith. The Air Force, Xiu Xiu’s fifth studio album and follow-up to last year’s La Forêt, is due for release in a matter of weeks on the band’s label, 5 Rue Christine, but Xiu Xiu is not taking any time off. Instead, they’re taking advantage of the hiatus between their tour of Europe earlier this spring and the U.S. tour supporting The Air Force, which kicks off in late September, to get a jump start on their next album. This pace of work is about average for Xiu Xiu, which since its inception has put out roughly an album a year, on top of EPs, live recordings, splits, other cooperative and side projects, and the inevitable months spent on the road.
The mission-style apartment complex where Stewart lives is just off the freeway, and the drone of passing cars can be heard through the screen of trees in back. Much of Xiu Xiu’s music has been recorded here since Stewart moved in a year and a half ago. He says the neighbors don’t mind, except when the drums get loud; then they retreat to a studio. It’s a remarkably relaxing spot, the opposite of the barren, concrete-floored black box one would envision Xiu Xiu’s songs emanating from after even a cursory listen to La Forêt, or its predecessor Fabulous Muscles. Instead, whitewashed walls glow brightly beneath exposed wooden beams. Sunlight streams through the panes of antique windows, revealing a line of bird feeders above a deck littered with the husks of sunflower seeds. A statue of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, guards the entrance to the living room, which looks out over ruddy tile roofs and a faraway stand of palm trees.
Dark-eyed, with a spill of black hair falling over his forehead, Stewart has some of the nervy energy of a young Anthony Perkins. His speaking voice is lower than you’d expect from his primary singing register, a breathy falsetto that seems forever on the verge of breaking, but always spins out the unbearable tension without the relief of a snap. He manages to be simultaneously friendly and reserved, with a bottomless gaze that remains inscrutable.
McElroy is Stewart’s cousin, although shedoesn’t look it. A soft fringe of red-brown hair floats around her face, and her eyes, elongated by darts of eyeliner, are hazel.
The two share an obvious rapport, despite an age difference of over ten years and the fact that they never hung out while they were growing up. McElroy has been a member of Xiu Xiu since she was 19, an age when most nascent musicians are only dreaming of the tour circuit. Stewart brought her into the fold of Xiu Xiu, which he founded with Cory McCulloch, in 2004, when both McCulloch and longtime collaborator Lauren Andrews opted out of the tour for Fabulous Muscles. With her recent move from Seattle to San Francisco, and the addition of Bay Area percussion wizard Smith, Xiu Xiu’s juggernaut of noise seems poised to keep rolling indefinitely through the indie music scene.
The Air Force promises to bolster that momentum in the wake of La Forêt, which rocketed up the college radio charts in 2005, garnering the band its first wave of truly national media attention. Produced by Greg Saunier of Deerhoof, who effectively functioned as an additional band member during recording, playing on ten of its eleven songs, the new album is more subdued and less confrontational than La Forêt. The latter seethed with a corrosive anger, much of it political, that reached its climax on “Saturn,” as Stewart fantasized about raping George W. Bush. The Air Force, by contrast, looks inward to more personal frustrations, a shift Stewart says was incidental, despite the slightly more hopeful political climate that accompanied its recording. “We didn’t do it consciously. That’s just the way it came out. It’s definitely more about the negative aspects of sex than about politics.”
It’s still not easy listening. Take this bleak reflection from “Wig Master”: “Loneliness isn’t being alone, it’s when someone loves you and you don’t have it in you to love them back.” The deep well of personal neuroses gives rise to plenty of unsavory spectacles, and Stewart’s world remains a nasty, brutish state of nature, just like the real thing: “When the fox hears the rabbit cry / he comes running but not to help.” As numerous reviewers of Xiu Xiu’s music have noted, it’s impossible for listening to it to be a passive experience, and The Air Force is no exception. Love it or hate it, there’s no way to remain unmoved by their musical turn of the screw, by the claw swipe of autoharp on “Bishop, CA,” or the dying wheeze of the accordion, like a collapsing lung, on “Boy Soprano.” Or by the grotesque imagery of “Save Me Save Me:” “No eyes no nose no mind ... your body rotten as the last melon on the vine.” Or by the bevy of chimes, bells, whistles, sirens, whipcrack drums, and all the static and halting motions of sound pulverized into brittle, fragile bits.
The leader of the free world doesn’t get violated this time around, but for The Air Force Xiu Xiu hasn’t retreated completely from expressing political opinions, as its title shows. It makes a twisted kind of sense that Stewart, who named the band after “the saddest film he had ever seen,” Joan Chen’s 1999 opus about the human cost of China’s Cultural Revolution, would name its latest album after a group of people he hates. “It’s about the way the Air Force is being used in the war on terrorism, insofar as it involves the most people getting killed in the most indiscriminate and random way, and yet the people who are in the Air Force are the most removed from the stuff that they’re doing.”
Then there’s the gruesome icon on the cover, a stunner of a Jesus pic that Stewart and McElroy discovered at an art exhibit in Turin, Italy last year. (They’ll be there again this December recording the follow-up to 2005’s Ciautistico!, a split produced with Italian art rockers Larsen under the name XXL). It shows a very unhappy-looking Son of Man, with furrowed brow and scarlet eyes, bloodied by a crown of thorns the size of nails. Again, this goes back to the album’s title and the war, says Stewart, “insofar as the right-wing has co-opted a philosophy that was originally about forgiveness and love and non-violence.” More than a perverse desire to twit conservatives, it’s a bid to rescue a much-abused symbol from their clutches that reveals an unexpected side of Stewart, as one of those rare artists who made it through Catholic school but still stick up for religion. “I was really fortunate in my religious upbringing,” says Stewart. “I know I’m an incredible anomaly, but the religion I grew up with was pretty positive and good. [My parents] taught it to us as a way to be a good person and feel connected to life, rather than a way to make sure I stayed in line.”
McElroy adds another unexpected nuance to The Air Force: her solo singing on “Hello from Eau Claire.” Her warm and wistful delivery captures the song’s gamine, awkward tenderness (“I know it’s stupid to dream / that you might think of me as a man”), a striking change-up from Stewart’s anguished monologues on the rest of the album.
In general, says McElroy, “I’ve been starting to get involved with playing more and singing out more, which I used to be really uncomfortable with. I don’t know if I’m going to be doing any lead vocals for upcoming stuff, but it might happen.”
Stewart just might need reinforcements, if Xiu Xiu’s vocals are going to stand up to a real live drummer. Since, up until now, Xiu Xiu has mainly worked with programmed percussion, one can only imagine the strange tattoos and jarring rhythms that jazz and art-rock veteran Smith will bring to their soundscape. Smith, who’s played with Stewart in Seven Year Rabbit Cycle, knows his way around everything from vibraphone to Asian drums, and juggles diverse projects as easily as polyrhythms. Originally, Smith was slated just to open for Xiu Xiu on this fall’s tour, until Stewart worked up the courage to ask him to join them full time. Just recalling Smith’s acceptance makes his two bandmates erupt in an ecstatic “Yeah!” as if they were reliving a winning game or a successful marriage proposal.
“Caralee and I are OK percussionists,” says Stewart humbly, “but he’s really widely studied and interested in all kinds of drumming. And he’s very focused on what we think are really fantastic parts of music.” The new arrangements for the tour have yet to be hashed out, but they did provide a sneak preview of what shows will be like with Xiu Xiu’s newest secret weapon.
“It’s going to be this onslaught of Ches,” says McElroy. “The curtains will open, and it’ll be Ches on the drums, and all the spotlights will be on Ches. He’ll do a drum solo for like five minutes.”
“We’ll be eating crackers,” says Stewart, laughing.
When describing the process in which new songs emerge, Stewart is just as playful and down-to-earth. There’s no artistic manifesto or mystic bolt of inspiration. It’s more like monkeying with a divining rod. “It’s almost always some aspect of fooling around,” he says, “but not one hundred percent fooling around. It’s hard to describe exactly what the feeling is, but I’ll just be screwing around with something and suddenly it will feel like something we could play a hundred times in a row and not get tired of.”
Given their touring schedule, finding a song that will wear well is important. But Stewart says he’s not worried about burnout. “We approach stuff philosophically, I guess, in the same way that we always have. We don’t want to take a lot of breaks. We’re pretty constantly working on stuff. But it’s what I’ve been wanting to do my entire life, so now that I get to do it all the time, I find it really satisfying, fortunately.”
“You do get tired from touring,” admits McElroy, her face warmed by a spritelike smile. “But the music — you never get tired of that.”
www.xiuxiu.org
Xiu Xiu’s tour hits the West Coast in early November, returning to the Bay Area to play San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall on November 10. For a full list of dates, see their website. |
