- The latest album from Xiu Xiu Girl with Basket of Fruit is an uncompromising record which highlights the relevance and the perpetuation of brutalities, particularly those affecting women, and ultimately meditates on our species impeding doom for failing to address these events adequately. It could possibly their most considered attempt at a cohesive conceptual album with a loosely interwoven symbolism running through it’s mostly cacophonous and rage filled storyline.
The album leans less on the direct personal experiences that have been highlights some past Xiu Xiu releases, leaning towards a sense of false grandeur with suggestions of bodily horror, abstracted descriptions of brutalities, and obsessive list taking. A common thread runs through tracks like Girl With Basket of Fruit, It Comes Out As A Joke and Ice Cream Truck, each of which describes to some extent traumas sustained by women in a rambling drawl. The raw, and mostly unmusical shouts of Jamie Stewart on these tracks give the impression of a completely impromptu, possibly drunken catharsis, something that is entirely not unfamiliar territory for the Xiu Xiu recording process. The vocal production has a notable quality to it, drifting in and out of clarity, sometimes buried under pummelling rhythms and moving around the room.
The instrumental production maintains a familiar feel of endless overdubs and tweaks, everything revisited and growing into the reflective collages of odd percussive rhythms and frantic synthesizers which typify the sound of this record. Pumpkin Attack on Mommy and Daddy takes this approach to its logical conclusion with a densely layered and bombastic beat heavy house track. There’s a contrasting approach with the droning double bass and dramatic, theatrical singing of Amargi Ve Moo, which devolves slowly into a flurry of hysterical mouth sounds and the subdued drones of The Wrong Thing. The addition of percussionist Thor Harris places the bells and whistle in capable hands, and adds a number of more pummelling exotic percussion elements to these pieces.
The closing track Normal Love features Oxbow vocalist Eugene Robinson who groans and delivers a verse over the gentle piano and bass instrumental which provides a very short release from the intensely percussive and distraught emotional onslaught. As with all Xiu Xiu records, it can take several listens for the dense and instinctive collage of musical and conceptual ideas to settle in and be recognised, if the will to listen to the uncomfortable is there to begin with. There isn’t any restraint in their delivery, and there are few musical artists who are able to speak so truthfully to the nature of painful experiences. Girl With Basket Of Fruit doesn’t provide a lot of contrasting moods or surprising moments for veteran listeners, but the rawness and complexity of its aggressions are more than enough to sustain a growing interest.
- Jaden Gallagher.