Xiu Xiu - Girl With Basket of Fruit Album Review

Harry Mcilroy

Xiu Xiu - Girl With Basket of Fruit 

Genre - Experimental, Surreal, Ritual Ambient, Post Industrial

9/10

Xiu Xiu is an Experimental/Art Rock band formed in 2002 by lead singer Jamie Stewart. They have made what I believe to be some of the most boundary-ignoring and out-there music that still somehow functions, albeit very vaguely at times, in a “pop” realm. That being said, making a case for an album like this is no easy task. The sheer lack of recognisable structure, the near-incomprehensible lyrics, the deeply unsettling sounds constantly thrown at you, it all comes together to create one of the most disorientating musical experiences you could ever have. And despite my love for this album, with no context or point of reference, this listening experience could easily be straight-up unpleasant. So before the actual review, bear with me as I give you an insight into my personal experience with this album, and how I fell in love with it.

    Let me take you back to December of 2018, around the time the first single from this album, Scisssssssors, was released. Now, this was a particularly tumultuous point in my life. I had found myself with a myriad of personal issues, not the least being the recent second failure of my maths GCSE. Because of this, I had to go into tutoring. The idea of going alone to some stranger's house and displaying my complete lack of basic maths knowledge for weeks on end was not something I was exactly ecstatic about. And as I walked from school to the tutor's house every Monday, during a particularly dark and dreary winter season, I found myself with an utter lack of music that I could lose myself in. I often use music as a safe space, a highly personal and boundless world that I can enter and forget my problems for about four and a half minutes at a time. But pretty much all the music I tried to listen to felt way too garish and stilted. That’s where Scisssssssors, and by extension all of Girl With Basket of Fruit comes into play.

    The song opens with these jumpy alarm-like synth notes, leaping across the channel from ear to ear. Coupled with these unrecognizable, tortured sound effects and samples which descend onto the mix without warning, the track is instantly given a super unique and heavy anxious energy. After Jamie Stewert, lead singer, passionately whispers his strange and unreadable poetry, the track explodes with this surreal lumbering tribal percussion with a momentum that doesn't let up the entire time. Throughout the song, distorted tortured screams and sounds paint the entire track, adding a lot of flavour to the already very disorienting musical experience. The repeated lyrical motif of “you are erased” perfectly complements the completely foreign structure and sounds you’re getting blasted with. 

    Now, I am aware that this description will already turn off most people. But it’s this level of super abstract structure and sound play that really resonate with me during these moments of turmoil that we all face. I believe that there are certain emotions, such as deep stress and anxiety, that more standard music and general media can’t really sum up. That is what I really appreciate about highly experimental and abstract art. Due to the highly interpretable nature, I feel like sometimes it hits a certain spot that more overt media just can’t get to. And with this album in particular, there’s a certain beauty hidden under the deeply dark and violent abstractions. Occasionally, these lovely minimal string-based songs such as Amari ve Moo and The Wrong Thing will find their way into the tracklist, almost giving the listener a break from all the unfamiliarity. I see this as feeding into the album's special ability to portray complex feelings without being particularly digestible. There is always love and beauty hidden beneath emotional turmoil, even if it’s sometimes hard to perceive or accept. 

    One of this album's most unique and intriguing qualities is its ability to wrap this super abstract, disturbing sound play and lyrical content into music that is often incredibly and unexpectedly catchy, even danceable at times. Most music that fits under the “disturbing” category tries to fit this description by blasting the listener with shrill, incessant and often unlistenable noise for the length of a record or song. An album like Merzbow’s Pulse Demon is a perfect example of this. While that music definitely has its place, it can’t really be enjoyed in the same way as more standard music. That's where this album excels. While a lot of it is admittedly abstract and not exactly something you could waltz to, when it goes hard, it goes HARD. The first and titular track, Girl With Basket of Fruit, is one of the catchiest experimental songs I’ve heard, period. It has the same incessant tribal percussion as a few of the other tracks and wraps it in such a way where it legitimately bangs. The lyrics are as abstract and up to interpretation as ever, yet performed with such passion and vigour that it makes a lyric as weird and incompressible as “She sits on a bicycle and floats in space, she is in love with the angel of STOP LAUGHING!!!” so very entertaining to listen to. 

    Although they all have their individual quirks and weird energies, I see this album as having two types of song. The first are these super fast-paced almost hip hop tinged experimental bangers, such as the title track or Pumpkin Attack on Mommy and Daddy, and the second are these slower-paced poetic musings. The best example of the latter would be the most lucid and disturbing track on the album, Mary Turner Mary Turner. It is so impressively unsettling and disturbing. The track describes the 1918 lynching of 19 year old pregnant Mary Turner, in deeply gruesome detail. It is very hard to listen to, and a masterclass of lyrical storytelling. This track wouldn’t work nearly as well with a more standard delivery and instrumental palette, so it’s a good thing that nothing whatsoever about this track is standard. The completely disorienting bursts of noise and banging percussive, paired with the pitched-down spoken-word delivery, represents the tracks subject matter perfectly. One final point I want to make is that although this track, and album as a whole, is although the music here is exceedingly strange and out there, there is definitely a method to the madness. I can definitely see a person thinking this album is just lead singer Jamie Stewert fucking around for nine tracks, but if you give it a proper listen, the details and depth become very clear. This record actually had fifteen individuals working on it, and the idea that every aspect of this album was very laboured over frames it in a very different light.

    I could go on describing each track's individual elements for thousands of words, and they certainly warrant that, but really they need to be heard to be believed. So I’ll leave you with this. This album, and band in general, is certainly not for everyone, that’s a given. But I say what the hell, give it a shot. Just make sure to leave all expectation and musical presupposition at the door.