I love what xiu xiu do
I dig their schtik

some guy who annoyingly, loudly moans like jandek meets morrissey over bad avant garde and occasional fruity loops pop?

where's the RAWK, rob?

oh the RAWK is there! It is in nearly every song! I get AMPED listening to xiu xiu. It mnakes me wanns go fucking blow up defenseless people who have done no wrong.

boy soprano?

All this thread is missing is...

CREMATE ME AFTER YOU CUM ON MY LIPS.. HONEY BOY.

George, when it comes to bedtime
my sweetness will not go to waste
i will shoot this arrow right up anus and
youll taste what we taste,
i will stab it right through the bottom of your mouth
youll taste what we taste
what you make them taste

kind of like this album, kind of don't.

its like a 5/10

I love tracks about movie stars. Here's one I've always liked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqFY7UAjFnw

wiki lists caralee as playing on two tracks on this album. anyone know if this is true or not?

My experience as well. I've seen Xiu Xiu 5 or 6 times and each time it becomes less and less like what I am always hoping to see. They're coming here in a month or so and I think this might be the time I just stop going.

Knife Play was haunting. A Promise and Fabulous Muscles both had some amazing songs as well. Xiu Xiu still remains one of the most influential bands for me regardless of the turn they're taking. I can still see Jamie doing Hives Hives with tears in his eyes, but I can't bring myself to try and get into the new stuff. It's lost its reality for me.


Oh, and Jamie Stewart is fucking super sexxy.

Quite possible. Jamie has a habit of putting older songs on newer albums(see San Jose Fight Club and I Luv The Valley OH!)

Xiu Xiu are pretty great as some very curious evolution of 80's goth rock, at least that's how they sound to me. Don't know how many albums that evolution may take before growing tired, as asp described, but seems inevitable.

it all went downhill when they announced their new album was going to be called women as lovers. women as lovers? wtf SELLOUT.

on that do what i want song there is a part that sounds like he is going up the escalator to frasier's apartment to have gay sex. frasier of course being the show were the gay actor plays a straight man called niles because tv is too conservative for him to be gay.

i remember playing ceremony/i love the valley to a friend and he said it was absolutely class! then i mentioned jamie was gay and he looked at me annoyed like "wtf did you have to spoil it for me for... you know i'm in the closet and can't admit it to myself" but of course he said nothing.

My own mother compared me to Niles, recently.

niles = grunge icon. he was the one who sold kurt the skag

I liked Women As Lovers. In Lust You Can Hear The Axe Fall reminds me of their better material.

i will never hate this band. maybe they are a bit comfortable now. they could still do great things in the future. everyone is right to call them out for their failings - it's up to them to really care and try to do something new.

what did she say exactly?

You do look like him a little actually hahahah.

I've tried to listen to it three times but I've never made it all the way through. It sucks. Knife Play is great, but Dear God... won't steal any more of my attention.

Well I was telling her about how offended I was at how somebody, here, compared my appearance to Dave Coulier but she interjected when I got around to "from that television show" with Niles from Frazier. Needless to say, that's much better than "that annoying guy from Full House" but I asked her further and she said something about being equally esoteric (read: pretentious).

On closer introspection, though, we are both skinny, blond-headed snobs.

You know what I honestly think? As they've went along, they've wanted to be taken more seriously. Of course, their songwriting hasn't really improved, it's just gotten a bit more boring, some might call it a refinement, but it betrays what made them interesting to begin with, while still forcing in these little parts to appeal to their fans from 9 years ago. Ultimately, I do think they have some unique material, but more often, it's annoying material, and the new stuff just sounds suffocating, like all this stuff is going on, clashing with each other, and it's hard to appreciate from any angle. The songs aren't really good enough to get into, the noises aren't anything new or interesting, there's nothing haunting or particularly interesting about the songs, and the lyrics are the same tired shit. It's pretty much business as usual, except it sounds a bit cleaned up and more, eh, "focused" than before. Which isn't my thing.

I've always really liked this band. That said, I thought Women as Lovers was pretty fuckin' boring aside from like 2 songs. I'll check this new one out though. They're playing here in a few weeks I think. I'm debating whether or not to go.

It's ok. Pretty run-of-the-mill and not a big departure for them. Even Woman As Lovers is a better record I think. But it's looking like they pretty much hit their peak with The Air Force anyway.

he started sleeping with women and his band went down hill.

what did he expect?

I just came back from seeing xiu xiu. It was amazing, I have no words to describe it, just phenomenal?

I think their recent work is way more interesting than the first albums. My favourite is still la foret because... they've been doing something new since then. The first albums were very nice, but still guitar song stuff. What they are doing now takes getting used to, but there's some real thought behind it. It's still very very melodic, and their set up is extremely creative and the sound incredibly powerful with only two people onstage.

His songwriting is still as innocent/dirty/miserable/kitsch and his voice just beautiful.

It's just difficult to hear at first, it takes a few times, but these last albums (air force/women as lovers/dear god, i hate myself) have some powerful tracks.

I'm not going to really debate any of your points, though I do have to stop question when you call the band "very very melodic". I'm not sure about that one...

Despite all the sounds they are very catchy melodic songs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4xuQiwgbZM

I just wouldn't describe them overall as a very melodic band, a few songs notwithstanding..

I seem to have a very particular definition of what melodic is, so ok.

Yeah, apparently, you have your own definition, which isn't the right definition. There are melodic elements, like some of the bass at times, and whatever, and they certainly have went more into that boring direction on recent albums, but yeah. They're pretty amelodic overall.

if you can whistle it, its melodic.
all of his singing can be whistled.

you can whistle a drone

Yeah, you can whistle feedback. You can whistle Merzbow.

Knox, I'm a musician, I know what a "melody" is.

Just sayin.. Just because Xiu Xiu uses melodies on a few songs doesn't make them a "very very melodic band".

i wish i could whistle. because then i could pretend knox was right and consider myself some kind of melodic genius

I am a musician too, so what? It doesn't mean we can't have different opinions/definitions, it doesn't mean you know any more than anyone else. Here are some I found:

• tune: a succession of notes forming a distinctive sequence
• the perception of pleasant arrangements of musical notes
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

A melody (from Greek μελῳδία - melōidía, "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a sequence of pitchesdurations, while, more figuratively, the term has occasionally been extended to include successions of other musical elements such as tone color. and
Melodies often consist of one or more musical phrases or motifs, and are usually repeated throughout a song or piece in various forms.
There's a shitload of repetition of musical phrases and/or motifs, there are choruses and verses, althought I think you are referring to their attempts to balance that with noise and unexpected/"unpleasant" arrangement.

If by "melody" you mean what you find pleasant and catchy, that does vary a lot from person to person, their cultural background, familiarity to what they are hearing and so on. Those definitions are hardly easy enough for anyone to claim they know what melody is.

Personally, I don't need to be in the mindset to find "order in chaos" to easily identify this melodic phrases when listening to Xiu Xiu, as they usually provide verse/chorus/verse structures.

In fact, what I think is so difficult about listening to them at first is that it is disrupting how these singing melodic lines are constantly broken or drowned by random and atonal sounds.

but anyway THIS IS A LAME DISCUSSION.
because it's only happening because you can't accept that I find it melodic and catchy and dancable, which I do.
the structure of what he is SINGING is melodic most of the time.

now, you can please whistle merzbow and put the file up for us to listen.

Lame discussion in which knox is right (but still a cunt).

Seriously though, the main thing to latch onto in Xiu Xiu is their melodies. There's really very little else there. The melodies are usually counterposed to 'noises' rather than other melodies or chords; I'd argue that makes them far more melodic than many other bands at the moment (a trick that Nico does as well)

always in agreement with a previous poster, butting in everywhere to say something bitter rather than something new.

how can you do it with this amount of words when I need hundreds and CAPS.
watch out, here comes wellcharge.
i never knew you listened to xiu xiu, save me is for dancefloors.

I think they juxtapose noise and melody very well so I can't really say either of you are wrong actually haha.