Xiu Xiu
Knife Play

THE REVIEW

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.