Notable longplayers

28 September 2024

Californian art noise duo XIU XIU aren’t the lazy kind of artists.
In their 22-year-old career, they fabricated 13 LPs, with last year’s
primo Ignore Grief album as the most recent one.

Recently, the duo moved from L.A. to Berlin where
they experience a new stream of inspiration.

New album artwork

And here’s album number 14, titled, eh,… 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian
Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips is out now and playing for a while now
on my head’s stereo.

Press info: “Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart deliver some of the band’s most compelling and mesmerizing music to date. Mixed by John Congleton (Chelsea Wolfe, Swans, Lana Del Rey) this album is unlike anything the band has ever recorded previously and was motivated by the destruction of previous aesthetic notions, as well as the band’s recent move from Los Angeles to Berlin.”

The Quietus writes: “13”… is a superlative pop record, but still an endless cycle of extremes.
A shining, distorted, expertly constructed, open-ended record, that might be Xiu Xiu’s best.”

TUTV: This is their most intense, most emotional and most accessible album to date.
Well, not that it will sell millions of copies and be No 1 on the charts all over the world.

It’s still XX, always exploring different soundscapes, but here they come up with
less complex song structures, actually more (sort of) conventional alt ones. And?
Outstanding record dominated by layers of industrial synths and chilling melodies.

I hear Cure-esque echoes (Common Loon / Veneficum), eerie and ghostly vocality
à la the late great Scott Walker (Arp Omni / Sleep Bvld.) and trippy Cabaret Voltaire
dynamics. All together, these sonic ingredients lead to a fascinating XX opus.

The more spins, the more your ears
get around this new Xiu Xiu exploit.

KEY SINGLE

ALBUM

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XX: Instagram