•
Rating: Jamie Stewart is the embodiment of my dreams and nightmares. In his overwhelming balance between desperate rawness and childlike sweetness, lost in his crucible of noise and passion, he always manages to move me. Always. And it is also thanks to him that Xiu Xiu consistently reigns in my ears like an unstoppable avalanche. Icy, violent, wonderful.
And never is his poetic, lyrical, and dreamy style better told than in "Knife Play," the debut album of the band: an exceptional masterpiece of dark wonders. A continuous emergence and dive back into darkness, a game of hide and seek in the folds of the psyche, with a view of a landfill of burned dolls and childhood traumas locked in the closet. Where the sound of a lowered hiding underwear is the key to infernos hidden in the soul, of fleeting and emblematic escapes into nothingness with no return.
And right from the opening, splendid, "Don Diasco," I'm forcefully dragged into the subliminal howls of Lethe. It's the sound, magnificent, of the cathartic journey into a hell that has not lost its humanity and its rotten heart. And I remain enchanted among these eleven pieces that seal the primal beauty of a group that sounds both naïve and complex, challenging yet incredibly, at the same time, delightful.
From the ecstatic nervous breakdown of "I Broke Up," with its syncopated scream "Don't fuck with me! Don't fuck with me," to the splendid tour de force of "Luber," an unsettling declaration of love suffocated by the screeching of sounds, passing through a gem of beauty like the beautiful "Suha" or the desperate "Hives Hives"...
Every song is a soul unto itself, a spectrum that clings to anyone who grants it a minimum of attention, ending up enchanting with explosions of shouted poetic fury in the dark ("Homonculus"), dragging you into a lyrical shy and introverted dithering only to throw you into a musical tail that challenges and sodomizes the angels ("Poe Poe"), or hitting you with rawness and unexpected flashes of mournful joy ("Over Over").
Let yourself be hit too. Among the screams of a young man who does not hesitate to enter your temples and the clattering of melodies that seem to come out of the monsters trapped in his throat. Let yourself be overwhelmed by his skeletons in the closet and by his ambiguous gaze, always fixed on you.
Always fixed on you.
Always fixed on you.
Always fixed on you.
The macabre and perverse beauty is all here.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Don Diasco (02:54)
good god baby
lady’s high
baby aping full on high
i cross my heart all the time
it’s always the same
nothing happened
i cross my wrist now you shut up
it’s always the same
nothing happened
miya
jailbird
softy sigh
miya who cried
secret sigh
03 Luber (04:02)
Luber
I want to hug you
I want to tell your mom to love you
You got your dreams
They're about the Birthday Party
I've got my dreams
Whatever they used to be
Luber
On your birthday
I will answer your 1000 questions
Luber let me help you
It will ease my conscience
What would it be
If you knew were saving my soul
And what would you think
If you knew you were the toast of my town
Luber, on your birthday
I will answer your 1000 questions
Luber let me help you
It will ease my conscience
05 Dr. Troll (03:54)
la la holds inside of her
the horrible dream of being somebody
thinking about her dream makes her feel
like it’s stupid
a dream whose coming true
is a must a must
it would be so much easier
if she was a real girl
the preschool students ask her
what she is
she thinks i don’t know
she says what do you think
listen to On Fire and pretend someone could love you
listen to Birthday and dream they knew the half of it
listen to Lady Day and pretend someone could love you
listen to Nick Drake and dream they knew the half of it
08 Suha (04:57)
black lung got you down tonight
saving it all for work
suha pins her arms to her side
watching her twin want to die
i hate my body, i hate the desert
please let me escape
when will i be going home
i hate my husband, i hate my children
i’m going to hang myself
when will i be going home
black hair got you down tonight
black love black cuts from your work
weep like the busted girl you are
wash down your hope in that car
my name is suha, i’m 25 years old
i’m going to hump a cop
when will i be going home
Loading comments slowly
