Xiu Xiu’s new album, Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 is worthy of a quote by Buenaventura Durruti: “We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We carry a new world here in our hearts.” Xiu Xiu certainly have no fear when it comes to covering other artists’ songs and their new world is so big they couldn’t fit it all on the album proper. Those preordering will receive a 7” single exclusive to Bandcamp, featuring CoBrah’s ‘Brand New Bitch’ and OMD’s ‘Enola Gay’.
Enough of enticements. I suppose one could be critical and say that the choice of some cuts on this album chime with those belted out at karaoke nights for aesthetes of a certain age. But ‘Psycho Killer’ is a dramatic opener that grows with repeated plays. More acidic than the original, it interjects drama where The ’Heads favoured quirk. With its overheated organ sounds, heavily reverbed vocals and primitive percussion, that bashes about like a drunk bloke playing the spoons in your kitchen, the track often sounds more like an ode to Joe Meek than to Talking Heads.
Ah, yes, Joe Meek. A word about him is in order. Though his music is not present here, his spirit certainly is. There is plenty of spacewards tinkering, lots of torrid sentiment and hyper-maudlin stylings that switch to existential, horror-tinged passages at the drop of a hat. Listening to the glorious, Purple Heart-loaded take on This Heat’s ‘SPQR’, or the cold & ghostly parody of Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ (recorded in a Lancashire cotton mill?) you can imagine him, restlessly pacing around his dingy flat, his mind exploding with new ideas on how to turn the world on through sound. This Meekian unease, with its attendant contrasts and switches in tone and tempo mean new life always shoots through the rubble. Whereas Soft Cell’s ‘Sex Dwarf’ is a fairly perfunctory take (arrangements sounding like odd sonic curlicues that feel tacked on to the original edifice), we hear the opposite almost immediately with Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’. Odd, and uneasy, but one that sticks in the mind, this track is no longer a paradigm of bittersweet bubblegum pop but a parched Victorian plod bereft of hope, a biblical tale of suffering and temptation. Robyn should cover it.
Often the act of listening in does play out like a karaoke night where you wonder just what’s up next. Songs couple up to act as each other’s opposite. Second track, The Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette’, is sleek and sexy; suggestive where ‘Psycho Killer’ was left free to rant itself into exhaustion. The scree of grey electronic noise that envelops the track ninety seconds in is just fantastic, as is the mutation of the original’s cold, whistling synth into something more psychedelic (it’s actually very similar to the synth refrain heard on Talking Heads’ ‘Drugs’). The sonic switches continue with ‘I Put A Spell On You’, which is a hyper-charged squall and rattle of black, oily noise; imagine a heavily-laden touring motorbike, with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins strapped to it and begging to be let off. Immediately afterwards we are cast inert onto the lakes of fire and ice with ‘Hamburger Lady’, where we writhe like Milton’s Satan in book one of Paradise Lost. The vocals are beyond creepy, also reminding one of Sharon Tate’s deadpan whisperings in Eye of the Devil. I’m not sure if convention allows us to say this version of ‘Hamburger Lady’ is “better than the original” but it certainly runs it close.
Given all of the above it’s also unsurprising that marked, even brutal spiritual and emotional juxtapositions can be found throughout the record. Many of the songs Xiu Xiu have chosen are songs of heartbreak, defiance, or despair. Take the last four tracks. GloRilla’s ‘Lick Or Sum’ luxuriates in rolling around on its huge, shiny, sonic couch whilst playing with itself. After that, the gentle if slightly fragmented orchestration that cushions Daniel Johnson’s ‘Some Things Last A Long Time’ props up a vocal take that is as emotionally affecting as it can be. Another flex happens with a take on Coil’s ‘Triple Sun’, a mysterious, impersonal sound file not giving much way outside of what we hear. The mind’s eye conjures up a huge freighter floating by in the middle of the ocean, its stacked containers full of nothing but empty longing. Then, by brutal and, it must be said, slightly annoying contrast we get an impish soufflé whipped up in the name of The Runaways’ ‘Cherry Bomb’. The repeatedly punched notes on what sounds like a toy Casio and the squawked vocals bolster the belief that this was recorded in a bedroom, the band bouncing on a bed together. It feels deliberately light, incomplete, annoying: a teen v-sign to the world. And, maybe, a fitting coda to some of the heavy, heavy emotions that preceded it?
What drives an artist to remake another’s work? On reflection it is probably a desire to undergo a multidimensional process: to replicate or learn from techniques and technologies found in the original artefact, a notion that a new time births new perspectives that only the remaker can impart, a desire to scratch an itch that wants to embellish, or destroy, or to remake and remodel the original, and then to display it again. Still: why put so much effort into something that has already been done? From Rubens copying Titian to Xiu Xiu’s new album of cover versions, this question will always remain at some level. In scratching their own itch, Xiu Xiu have made a brave record and one which we, in turn, can employ to our own ends.
