Album Review: Xiu Xiu - Girl with Basket of Fruit
Though Xiu Xiu on their last record flirted more with art pop than anything else, their newest venture is about as industrial and purposely experimental as music can get. It feels like the band could not decide on whether they wanted Girl with Basket of Fruit to come off as an incoherent piece of Dadaism or something more thematically understandable while still sounding erratic. What they produced, intentions be damned, is an album of perplexing and occasionally poetic noise; the knowledge that at least some of its lyrics were written under the influence makes way too much sense.
It's hard to imagine the more casual listeners, uninitiated to these sounds, pressing play on this record and make it much further than the first track. The titular opener boasts a nonsensical mix of high-pitched synths, unusual percussion, and half-screamed lyrics that alternate between being swallowed by everything else and cutting through with nonsense like "She sits on a bicycle and floats in space/She is in love with The Angel of Stop Laughing". Much of the lyrics on this song (and the album as a whole) are much more crass than this, yet no less inane.
This song, alongside similarly abrasive cuts like Ice Cream Truck and the closer Normal Love, embodies the worst aspects of avant-garde art: attempting to push boundaries just for the sake of it and coming off as little more than self-aggrandizing. The latter track, to its credit, is bolstered somewhat by a piano melody, filtered to sound distant and almost electronic atop a subdued guitar line. Unfortunately, at some point the vocals transition from similarly tender to annoyingly strained, a recurring problem across the tracklist.
Despite these issues, the diversity of sound across this album shows just how versatile Xiu Xiu are as a group. Amargi ve Moo is instrumentally sparse, the absence of all but a viola and double bass being a welcome change from the noisy clamor preceding it. Lyrically, the song describes bluntly the affects of cancer on the body while veering off occasionally into more abstract ideas of death and what comes after; even when the voice trails off into psychotic noises, it hits on exactly the balance between disturbing and amusing.
After the first four tracks of inaccessible oddity, that Pumpkin Attack on Mommy and Daddy is so immediately catchy is perhaps the most surprising moment on the album. The synths and aberrant percussion are noticeably groovy, and even the interjected vocal samples and non sequiturs as the song descends into madness cannot take away from the track's charm.
Conversely, Mary Turner Mary Turner describes in painful detail the tragedy of its titular martyr, a black woman killed while eight months pregnant in 1918 after protesting the lynching of her husband. To embody the brutality of a mob slaughtering a woman and her unborn child is no easy task, and Xiu Xiu for once do not mince words: "Mary Turner, Mary Turner/Split open with a knife/From her womb onto the ground". The song ends with an unambiguous condemnation of the racism that caused this atrocity, which is still so prevalent in America today; an incredibly difficult listen no doubt, but as a criticism of bigotry, it is quite effective.
Occasionally, music that at first assaults one's ears with strange sounds and odd choices reveals its hidden depths after struggling through multiple listens. Girl with Basket of Fruit is, for the most part, not one of those records, and despite what the offbeat lyricism might have you believe, what you see is largely what you get here. Still, though, Xiu Xiu have a few tricks up their sleeves when it comes to weaving their ramblings into varied and interesting production, and though 'enjoyable' is perhaps not what they were going for, their haphazard experimentation is entertaining in its own way.
6.5/10
Favourite Tracks: Amargi ve Moo, Pumpkin Attack on Mommy and Daddy, Scisssssssors