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about this album
Jamie Stewart is what Victorian society would have called, “an unsettling young man.” To hear Jamie’s band Xiu Xiu play is to be shaken, disturbed, and shown something original. If they say everything’s been done, and that the only thing that cracks of newness is what is often called “the unspeakable vision of the individual,” then Jamie is in a rare class. His music is new because it’s solidly Jamie himself. There is only one Jamie Stewart and because he writes honestly about his personal experience, there is only one Xiu Xiu. Jamie sings haunted and tortured though always with a sense of humor somewhere below the poisoned blood. While he whispers and shakes and shouts about family secrets, mental sickness, and mortal rot—oft times from a feminine perspective—unnatural percussion cracks around him like wine glasses snapped at their stems. Guitars clang and break into damaged strums, and we are suddenly jarred into listening. Jamie’s last three records, Knife Play, A Promise and Fabulous Muscles were exercises in pain unaffected for—or by—art and audience. Lyrics named names and journalists compared his music to Morrissey, Conor Oberst, and the more industrial veins of dance music. Jamie’s new record is his most harrowing and beautiful to date. On La Foret, he sings about death, doomed love and the decay of relationships. As always, he becomes more specific. Jamie says, “Saturn” is about “wanting to rape the president to death and eat his body as inspired by the Goya paint
