Xiu Xiu - OH NO Review
The atmosphere, melodies and features dotted throughout its runtime can be really quite impressive and oddly beautiful, but the over-the-top, melodramatic performances by Jamie Stewart really drag the album down and drag the listening experience out.
Xiu Xiu’s twelfth studio album, OH NO, comes almost twenty years after their debut, with Jamie Stewart the only member to have survived since that starting point, at this point joined only by Angela Seo. Over this time, Xiu Xiu has become a fairly established name in the world of experimental rock, with several critically acclaimed and fan-loved records throughout the years — despite the inconsistency of the band’s membership, there has been a real consistency in their ability to churn out records. This newest LP, OH NO, has been billed as an album of duets, with a different feature accompanying Stewart on each track. Conceptually, this makes for an interesting idea, but despite the new voices throughout the record it still manages to sound fairly predictably Xiu Xiu, with over-the-top vocal performances, crafting ambient post-rock palettes interrupted with moments of abrasion.
It is clear right from the start that this is not a particularly accessible record, though accessibility is probably not something that Stewart really wants to aim for. The opening track, ‘Sad Mezcalita’, featuring Sharon Van Etten, is one of the more relatively conventional tracks, with at least a fairly traditional structure. Instrumentally, it builds from a sparse, meandering guitar melody into a synth-based chorus which feels as if it rushes around the vocals like a swirling wind. Those vocals, however, leave quite a lot to be desired, really over-acting the pained feelings they attempt to convey to the point where it is not at all believable. This is at its worst with the bridge, which feels like an interaction from a poorly written romantic drama film: “I have only ever been special to you/You were so much more than only special to me”. ‘I Cannot Resist’ takes this experimental, ambient energy and really runs with it — sprints even. After an interesting instrumental bridge, we are met here with the lines “Bong bing bonk-o bung/A head rolling down the stairs/Bing bong bonk-o bung”. While I really hope that this is Stewart playing around, something about the execution makes me really worry that there isn’t even an ounce of irony in those lyrics.
‘The Grifters’ is the strongest of the early tracks here, continuing to introduce the bizarre medieval-meets-dystopian future sound. While the over-the-top, operatic vocals are still here, Haley Fohr’s feature makes this work a little better, her voice offering more to this sound than is given up to this point. The old-timey English used in the lyrics also complements this in a way that is either pretentious or charming depending on whether you choose to give them the benefit of the doubt. The guitars in the instrumental, eventually accompanied by some marching percussion, build up a nice bit of tension, which is then released into a calm, spacey atmosphere to end the track.
Another recurring feature of the tracks on this album is a slightly messy composition. While at times this works, the chorus on ‘Goodbye for Good’ is not one of those times. While a clean aesthetic is far from the aim, Xiu Xiu take rough around the edges a little over the top here, while still admittedly finding some nice moments of ambience. The title track, ‘OH NO’, initially appears to fall into a similar trap but manages to find a bit more order in its chaos as the track pans out — sounding oddly pretty in a way that it absolutely shouldn’t be able to. Here, a wall of varied, dissonant sounds surrounds the distorted, German spoken-word verse of Susanne Sachsse, making for the first stand-out moment on the album.
The sound then takes a slightly unexpected turn with the album’s second single, ‘Rumpus Room’, effectively delving into industrial trip-hop, but in a way also reminiscent of recent work from The Garden. Again, it manages to find a sort of organised chaos which gets it to work, with a fairly solid groove driving it for the most part. The lyrics here are a little all over the place, at a stretch I want to suggest that it’s trying to re-imagine being high at a party in an abstract, first-person way; it is also very possible that a lot of them are without deeper meaning. This trip-hop sound is returned to in a slightly more conventional way towards the end of the record too, with ‘Knock Out’. In a generally very inaccessible album, ‘Knock Out’ is probably the most accessible track, with Alice Bag’s feature offering an almost conventional beauty.
There are, however, a few tracks here that end up quite forgettable. The notably un-notable for me are ‘Fuzz Going Fight’, ‘A Classic Screw’ and ‘Saint Dymphna’, all of which lack much drive beyond moments of pure dissonance. ‘Saint Dymphna’, in particular, came across as quite slow and messy, and ‘A Classic Screw’ had my least favourite feature in Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo. It also really takes quite a jarring leap lyrically, moving from an allusion to an abusive relationship to the words ‘Candyland toward candyland/Minnie Mouse leap!’, giving the feeling that they aren’t quite able to take this theme seriously.
We return to the medieval/dystopian sound in ‘I Dream of Someone Else Entirely’ but with a sparser, spacier atmosphere this time, now featuring a slightly theatrical vocal performance from Stewart and Owen Pallett, who produce a lovely duet here. With some of the most personal lyrics present on this album, it makes for a big, yet slightly understated, statement in the middle of the tracklist. Despite occupying a similar sound palette, however, ‘It Bothers Me All The Time’ offers a less successful statement, with the lyrics coming across as a little immature.
Beyond the ambient, experimental art-pop and trip-hop otherwise found on this album, there are also a couple of other genre dips made here, both of which feel slightly random. The first, a cover of The Cure’s ‘One Hundred Years’, takes the sound of an industrial alternative rock track, with a really powerful instrumental, really making a buzz at its point in the tracklist despite raising questions about its involvement — it feels like it could be from a completely different record. What keeps it tethered to this album, however, is its biggest flaw; again, the vocals really stain the sound. This is probably the most extreme example though, as Stewart again really overacts the pained sound to the performance, leading to a frankly annoying end-product. ‘A Bottle of Rum’, which acts effectively as the closer as the 15-second ‘ANTS’ adds close to nothing, makes an unexpected jump into some dreamy shoegaze. It feels odd making this genre leap so late in the album, made even weirder by the fact that this was also chosen as the first single in the lead up to the release of OH NO too. Despite being a sweet enough track, it doesn’t allow itself the chance to explore its sound. On top of this, the transition into the chorus is really quite jarring. As a way to close this album, it’s really quite unsatisfying.
With a different approach to vocals, OH NO could have been a decent record. The atmosphere, melodies and features dotted throughout its runtime can be really quite impressive and oddly beautiful, but the over-the-top, melodramatic performances by Jamie Stewart really drag the album down and drag the listening experience out. There’s also an underlying scattergun approach to aesthetic here, one which could have been expected considering the wide array of different features, making it hard to see it as one product. For something so late in Xiu Xiu’s career, it feels quite immature as a project, not least with the oh-so-random lyric writing found at certain points — which sometimes really negate an otherwise sombre moment.
