LOS ANGELES -- Since its inception more than two decades ago, the experimental rock band Xiu Xiu has danced between extremes.They’ve made music — drenched in synthesizers, breathy vocals and distorted guitar — that is somehow both cacophonous and beautiful, frightening yet poignant, avant-garde yet (mostly) melodic.In other words, Xiu Xiu’s music can’t be placed neatly into a box, something the band’s leader, Jamie Stewart, knows a thing or two about.“I don’t say this in a self-aggrandizing way, but I am a very weird person,” Stewart said.
“I wish I wasn’t.It’s not fun operating in the world in a way that doesn’t really fit.”As the prolific band gears up to release their 18th LP, out Friday, Stewart recognizes the ways in which these feelings of otherness have been meaningful for their art and their audience.
“Xiu Xiu is certainly not for everybody.But it is for very specific people, generally for people who are, in one way or another, kind of on the edge of some aspect of life,” Stewart said.
“That’s the group of people that we are and that is the group of people for whom we are trying to make records.”But even as they've stayed weird, Stewart admits there was a shift on “13'' Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips” — a reference to one of Stewart’s switchblades that served as a kind of “talismanic item” during the recording process.“Almost every single track is set up in the very traditional way that Western folk songs are organized — as a bridge, as a verse, as a chorus.So, in that way, because it’s a style of organizing music that people in the Western world have been aware of for 200 years, it is probably accessible,” they said.
“It seems to happen with every record we have ever done where somebody says, ‘It’s their most accessible record,’ which sort of implies to a lot of people that our records must therefore be inaccessible.”But that accessibility is varied, from the anth...