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Xiu Xiu - Women As Lovers
| Allmusic | | Xiu Xiu is so expert at straddling the line between avant-garde and indie rock that they've completely erased it. On Women as Lovers, there's less of a gap than ever between the band's ironically poppy (but genuinely) catchy songs and their experimental, unflinching ones. "I Do What I Want, When I Want" opens the album with chirpy synths and hints of a cheerful xylophone melody that are abandoned in what sounds like a sheet metal factory; hooky "doo-do-doo-do-doo" backing vocals are put through a distortion wringer. It's intense, it's uneasy -- but it's also strangely immediate in a way that only Xiu Xiu can manage. Over the rest of Women as Lovers, Jamie Stewart, Caralee McElroy, and crew cover the spectrum of their sounds, from "No Friend Oh!"'s outraged almost-pop to "Puff and Bunny"'s broken, self-loathing gamelan....full text |
| | Popmatters | | When frontman Jamie Stewart announced late last year that Xiu Xiu’s sixth studio album, Women as Lovers, would be “more approachable or communicative on a basic human level” than any of the band’s previous releases, a substantial number of fans likely scratched their heads in disbelief. After all, it had always been a form of anguished unpredictability that made Xiu Xiu a contemporary staple in the genre of experimental art-rock, with additional unconventional structural techniques making compatible similarities to other artists seemingly impossible. With past lyrical content that included perverse sexual fantasies, grotesque fetishes, and descriptive violence—often supplemented by instrumentation that would be easily classified as avant-garde—Stewart has always been rightfully credited as being a poetically brilliant lyricist, with an ability to write songs that treat the listener to simultaneous feelings of heartrending romanticism and uneasiness difficult to match....full text |
| | Pitchforkmedia | | Art-making involves getting what's inside on the outside, but usually it passes through a sterilizing filter first. But with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart everything spills out unmediated and mucky. To put a fine point on it, on Women as Lovers' "Black Keyboard", over a serpentine acoustic guitar and synth dirge, Stewart sings, "Why would a mother say such things/ Why add tongue to a kiss goodnight?" That line is an attack against commonly held virtues of understatement and discretion, and Stewart's willingness to revolt audiences with squeamish personal details that make him seem more scarily fucked-up than sensitive or emotionally open is what makes his music unique. His art seems to be more about who he is than who he'd like to be, and it's the tension between the mores of taste and Stewart's honesty that brings us back, despite ourselves, time and again....full text |
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