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Referencing everything from OMD’s Dazzle Ships (on the Speak-&-Spell-esque “Apple For A Brain”) to Tears For Fears’ The Hurting (on the digital-acoustic “Gray Death”), Stewart and Seo have twisted an admittedly dated retro-synth chic into something far more evocative and, yes, progressive.
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The seventh Xiu Xiu album may be the most playfully arranged and colorfully textured in the band’s catalog.
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But it's with his jarring mix of the banal and the brutal ("I will always be nicer to the cat / Than I will be to you") that Stewart shows his outrageous brilliance.
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Dear God, I Hate Myself is also the band’s most overtly electronic album in some time, with several songs composed on a Nintendo DS that gives the darkness of “Apple for a Brain” and “Secret Motel” an unpretentious, somehow friendly feel.
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Dear God… is as engagingly weird as anything before, but flows so much better by incorporating the customary sonic terrorism into verse-chorus-verse songs, rather than breaking off for performance poetry about living in the shadow of suicide, or (say) war as legitimate barbarism for jocks.
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There's just enough pop influence to catch the audience's ear along the way - the refrains on Chocolate Makes You Happy, Dear God, I Hate Myself, and This Too Shall Pass Away (For Freddy) are as infectious as any mainstream pop song.
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Now seven full-lengths into their career, Xiu Xiu have hit a milestone with Dear God, I Hate Myself. Over 12 songs, they condense the best aspects of all their previous albums to craft what may prove to be their finest hour.
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The album stands out as often exhilarating collision of disparate elements.
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But the kicker, for both music and lyrics, is Xiu Xiu's version of a pep talk, "This Too Shall Pass Away," where Stewart shows that being the most tortured musician of all time makes his fleeting flecks of hope doubly heartfelt.
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New listeners will be immediately confronted with a couple of very catchy, horror-laced new wave anthems about fatal beatings and bulimia, and make that perennial first-Xiu-Xiu-experience decision: Do I buy this?
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Most of the remaining 11 songs on Dear God, I Hate Myself are built around sequencers and beats rather than guitars, and while they’ve by no means called off their flirtations with dramatic bursts of noise, they are only intermittent over the 38 minutes
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At the very least, Dear God, I Hate Myself marks a new level of maturity and self-awareness for the band.
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Dear God, I Hate Myself packs enough of a wallop that it is worth sitting through some dross to get at the choice bits, which, as is the case with any of the best work by Xiu Xiu, are uncomfortable, uncompromising, and easily hummable.
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Deliriously drunk in its own eccentricities, “Dear God’’ is unlikely to win over new fans, and Stewart’s unhinged vocal acrobatics can get grating without former band member Caralee McElroy backing him up.
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This album, which he produced with the drummer Greg Saunier of Deerhoof, shudders with the tension of opposing ideals: folksiness and futurism, clarity and ambiguity.
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Xiu Xiu’s Dear God has at least three memorable post-punk anthems, including album opener “Gray Death.” For the most part, though, the album is a series of challenges.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 14
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Mixed: 1 out of 14
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Negative: 0 out of 14
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Oct 29, 2010