Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo team with Italian weird-rock shifters Larsen for a third XXL collection. The band originally improvised these pieces, rearranged them, and then quickly put down the definite versions found here.
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Despite the playful name of their collaborative project, XXL, neither American art-pop benders Xiu Xiu nor Italian weird-rock shifters Larsen seem to make music casually. For his part, Xiu Xiu foundation Jamie Stewart told me earlier this year that the band is how he's mostly organized his emotional life for two decades. "Not to sound over-dramatic," he said sitting in a sandwich shop, "but Xiu Xiu is totally essential to me getting through life." Whether in videos doused with vomit, songs chronicling struggles with suicide or sexual slavery, or albums that demand concessions to discomfort, intensity is an inherent quality of Xiu Xiu. As for Larsen's teeming sound worlds, the Torino quintet has previously worked with David Tibet, Michael Gira, and Steven Stapleton, three bandleaders known for the relentlessness of their oeuvres and approaches. On the brilliant 2007 live set ABECEDA, they revealed themselves as an elite instrumental ensemble, able to command an hour onstage with both grace and thunder.
But Düde, the pairing's third full-length released and first since 2007's ¿Spicchiology?, comes pleasantly marked by a sense of overriding ease, or at least the feeling that neither act fussed over or fiddled with these songs as much as they might have with their own. The big band-- Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo, plus all of Larsen-- originally improvised these pieces, rearranged them, and quickly put down the definite versions found here. Less songs per se than largely instrumental structured jams, these pieces seem undecided. "Absorption", for instance, feels at first like a workout in Harmonia worship, with tinkling bells and pulsating synthesizers washing into a solid state of reverie. Midway through, though, a chorus of squawking horns cuts in, providing a non sequitur stopgap that has very little to do with the conclusion of skittering noise and jarring guitars and even less to do with the halcyon start. Closer "Vaire", the one song Stewart sings here, allows for the kind of excess that he'd likely bowdlerize from his own albums. Before his unmistakably pained voice shows up, the outfit simply decorates the beat with a craggy guitar line, manipulated drum machines, and washes of noise; after he sings a verse, they rupture the beat until it falls apart, a trail of percussion and synthesizer whir following behind the fading pulse. The indulgence gives Stewart's pathos a rare patina of comfort and approachability. That is, if one of Xiu Xiu's chief assets is his urgency, Stewart works quite well in the absence of it, too.
That's symptomatic of XXL's real success on Düde, a record that finds its components pushing each other places they might not necessarily find themselves. They're better for it. The 18-minute "Oi! Düde" is a bold, pure sprawl of Krautrock inspiration, XXL building very slowly and indirectly into a climax of noise, drums, and droning tones. "Krampus" might not only be the most surprising thing here but also in the collective discography of both Xiu Xiu and Larsen. Drifting in like smoke, it's a ringer for a lost Six Organs of Admittance take, with guitars and oscillators intertwining around a xylophone core. Seo reads in Korean, her distant and diffident tone giving the piece a ghostly charm. It's almost impossible to imagine Xiu Xiu conjuring this much patience, or Larsen this much deliberate melody.
The stylistic tinkering within Düde does make the album feel less like a record and more like a string of ideas, a problem that these bands generally don't encounter on their own. The carnival-like wallop of "Disco Chrome" plays like an attempt to make the album something it's not. An instrumental series of pieces share the title "Film Me in the Laundry Nos. 1-3" as if to fix that cohesion issue, but that even they can't tie Düde's 51 minutes into a whole. To that end, these eight pieces feel not like their own, memorable book but more like chapters within the story of an unlikely and consistently interesting collaboration: Two restless bands on different continents converge, successfully shaking off their own aesthetic parameters for bits and pieces of occasional high intrigue.