Track Listing

01 I Do What I Want, When I Want (mp3)
02 In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall
03 F.T.W. (mp3)
04 No Friend Oh!
05 Guantanoamo Canto
06 Under Pressure (ft Michael Gira)
07 Black Keyboard
08 Master of the Bump (Kurt Stumbaugh, I can feel the soil falling over my head)
09 You Are Pregnant, You Are Dead
10 The Leash
11 Child At Arms
12 Puff and Bunny
13 White Nerd
14 Gayle Lynn

Xiu Xiu

Women As Lovers
KRS484

cd $13.00 (in-stock)
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We will send you the Special Edition version with the DVD if we have it in stock.
This will be a famous album. To hear it is to remember music's native
purpose, a howl against the gloom.
Xiu Xiu has long been known among the music bloggers as prolific,
bordering on crazed, but with this new 14-song album, each song so
different from the next and so fully realized, their creative ferocity is
simply astonishing and rapidly taking on new dimensions.
With a heart too sensitive to accept humanity's darker side yet also
unable to flinch from it, Xiu Xiu is a way of "owning your own shadow."
Jamie Stewart has a novelist's eye for juicy details, and a poet's ability
to wring impossible emotions out of the English language, finding black
humor where there is usually horror, finding horror where there is usually
apathy. And Stewart's history-spanning visions of birth and death have
never come across more clearly.
The performances, led by Stewart's one-of-a-kind voice, are intense,
virtuosic and painted in a spectrum of acoustic and electronic colors
that one would be hard pressed to find equaled on any album. Many of
the songs feature what is now officially the live line-up of the group,
with Stewart and Caralee McElroy joined by Ches Smith on drums
and Devin Hoff on bass. Women As Lovers marries the ancient with the
futuristic, each in all their beauty and terror. Traditional gongs collide
with a rat's nest of computerized layering.
Many a commentator feared that the "democratization" of recording
technology would result in a profusion of mediocre music with substandard
production values, and while this is largely true, they failed to see
another more exciting outcome. The ability to create music at home
with no clock ticking has allowed for a new level of care that would put
to shame the production tour de forces of another era. In the past
couple of years a new sound in popular music is being created, and
new masters of this unforeseen style are emerging. And Xiu Xiu is fast
becoming the standard against which any claims of meticulousness
must be judged.
Make no mistake. No other Xiu Xiu album has ever been more
approachable or communicative on a basic human level. What people
sometimes fail to recognize is that Stewart is writing about all of us, not
a freak writing about freakish things. He voices what the rest of us have
a hard time voicing and the feelings in the music are ones that we can
all relate to.

LP on Absolutely Kosher.