Xiu Xiu
A Promise

There are albums that change your life. They are very few, the result of selection or a bolt from the blue, but when they arrive, they tear you apart like a dying pig in a slaughterhouse. They open your legs and rape you with violence. They arrive and you feel bad, but at the same time, you like all this suffering and end up loving it.  Listening to these albums dresses you in invisible bruises. They rip your guts out with long, black nails. They make you feel tremendously vulnerable. 
You are a virgin. You are naked. You are useless. 
Frantic. Broken. Weak. 
You breathe with difficulty with an IV stuck in your arm.

Speaking of "A Promise," I'm not speaking as a fan (which I am), but as a hypersensitive person. Because it is a carnal album, made of sex and death, of growing despair, but also of childish boldness. It dares where others would stop, pauses to look into your chest and whispers, "Fuck me." You may find me vulgar, self-destructive, fussy, tedious, whining. Well. I don't care. Because this is true love.

Ten songs hidden behind a naive cover that encapsulates their essence: the degradation of sex without feeling, combined with the massacre of innocence, in an aseptic yet tremendously vile/intimate atmosphere. And the soul's embrace begins.

The beginning is already an orgasm: from the exhausting and wonderfully attractive strumming of a painfully beautiful ballad like "Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl", to the revolutionary "Apistat Commander", passing through the unexpected conclusion of the pure suffering of "Walnut House". There is rage in "Pink City", which is pure noise, but also deviated innocence in the cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car". There is a whole sick philosophy, a seductive world adrift, a river of seminal fluid thrown violently into a black sky, filling it with dead stars. It's "A Promise", one of those albums you either love or hate, it's true. But if you hate it, it's because you refuse to enter into such a high emotion, in a continuous rollercoaster of brilliance, of vivid emotions, of moments on the verge of improvisation.

It is sparse, yet at the same time as complex as few others: it is the ripe fruit of Jamie Stewart's tree, among the most brilliant contemporary songwriters of our time. To prove it, there is a track like the bloodthirsty "Brooklyn Dodgers", but above all an extraordinary diptych, beyond masterpiece, dreamy and disfigured. The first, "Sad Redux O-Grapher", is the prophetic subdued black mass on the end of love (in which I find myself completely) and, the second, "Ian Curtis Wishlist", the pleasant hell to seal the work. It advances with enveloping music that destroys itself with synths that take you to heaven and leave you there, floating, while Stewart's throat inflames, unravels, self-destructs. 

It is the miracle of music.

Close your eyelids and, even when the album is over, it is still there.