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Women As Lovers is proof positive that if navel gazing was an extreme sport, Xiu Xiu would be its leading practitioners, wielding an earnest approach which, while occasionally proving scary and even moving, borders heavy-handedness and rapidly becomes oppressive.
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Xiu Xiu's music is all about discomfort, but Stewart and co. have become quite comfortable in this conceptual space, and are able to inhabit it like painters making wild, broad smears that intuitively cohere into a look that is distinctly theirs.
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Gratuitously avant saxophone squawking mars some of the disc's best moments, but Xiu Xiu's knack for grafting lush hooks onto noisy post-rock remains seductive.
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Nobody else sounds like Xiu Xiu, and they've made themselves even more singular on this album.
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With Women as Lovers they have created one of their more accessible and cohesive albums to date.
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Women as Lovers capitalizes on it as yet another bold and consistently satisfying release in Xiu Xiu’s discography.
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Rather than using art as a cloak, Stewart constructs an exoskeleton out of precious wordplay and florid arrangements--armor that makes him as clumsy as it does strong.
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Under The RadarA newfound confidence is evident throughout, and for a band that deals exclusively with the darker hues of the emotional color wheel, Stewart and company appear comparatively comfortable, even if their music remains challenging.
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Their sixth album is also as pretentious as you would expect a record named after a novel by Austrian feminist author Elfriede Jelinek to be.
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Women As Lovers is a beautiful masturbation, and a little death for us all.
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UncutWomen As Lovers may be his best yet. [Mar 2008, p.107]
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It's Xiu Xiu's strength--as well as their weakness--to assault the listener with specificity, giving Women... a deeply voyeuristic sheen that can detract from the often thrilling musical invention at work here.
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Alternative PressIt's about as close a facsimile of the fractured and foreboding scattershot thoughts that haunt most of us at night as one can capture on record. [Feb 2008, p.115]
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The songwriting of its back-half just doesn’t stand up to its front-half or the rest of the band’s catalog.
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Jamie Stewart, as usual, sounds like a man on the edge of checking into a white-walled care facility, but that shouldn’t be seen as a negative against Women As Lovers.
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Though I can't say this album has as many of these killer tracks as Xiu Xiu's previous albums, Women as Lovers is a satisfying installment for fans of Xiu Xiu's singular style.
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The WireThese themes of anguish are not so much bleak as moving, for he always finds a way to inject his wry observations into the mix. [Feb 2008, p.54]
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Women as Lovers reveals itself as a nifty little album.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 14
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Mixed: 2 out of 14
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Negative: 1 out of 14
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josephd.Feb 1, 2008