Xiu Xiu
Fabulous Muscles
5RC

Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart broaches suicide, violation and love with a childlike candor about the universally misunderstood: why bad things happen to good people and why bad things happen at all. But it's only through Stewart's utmost sincerity that any listener is able to stomach such subjects without groaning and/or gagging. Buried under foreboding and abrasive minor-key guitar and synthesizer trills on "Mike," the final cut on Fabulous Muscles, Stewart limply whispers,

Dad, what was Nigel supposed to do with your body?/ a life I will never understand/ whose false teeth were gently pushed back into your mouth ... What am I supposed to do with this?

And what is a complete stranger supposed to do with such a private admission?

Herein lies the ado of Oakland, Calif.-based Xiu Xiu (pronounced "shoe" times two): The band's vocabulary (both verbal and sonic) is intensely personal yet the medium, for all the intents of a mass-produced CD, is public. Listening to Xiu Xiu, we become nosy neighbors with our ears pressed against the wall separating us from lives infinitely more fascinating and tragic than our own. Except the neighbors know we're listening — and they don't care. For anyone inevitably steeped in a culture in which the sight of a single bare breast is appalling and morally offensive, a forceful impetus is necessary to render social niceties moot. In that regard, what's better than tragedy?

However uncomfortable, Fabulous Muscles, Xiu Xiu's third full-length, contains beautifully exposed secrets. In the title track, one of Xiu Xiu's barest moments, Stewart pushes a sort of battered-wife syndrome love song just barely out of his mouth, singing, "Break my face in/ it was the kindest touch you ever gave" and in the chorus, "Cremate me after you cum on my lips/ honey boy place my ashes in a vase/ beneath your workout bench." Without the painfully fragile acoustic guitar strums beneath Stewart's lilts and gasps, the words are ridiculous and crude, but all together, the song is impossibly tender (and creepy).

The likewise lyrically silly "Clowne Towne," the only semi-cheerful song (and the album's best), features the line "your true love has drunk herself into not being able to pay her rent," a downer, for certain, but not against the warm, lush backdrop of Björk-ish synth gurgles, swaying violins and new-wave guitar.

On darker tracks, the sounds (churning, mournful, layered) better match the subjects. We decipher, from the din of chaotic bleeps and beats, Stewart's smothered calls to a victim of molestation ("Brian the Vampire") and from below harrowing horns, his gentle delivery of a dysfunctional message to his niece ("I can't wait 'til you realize the family you've been born into" from "Nieces Pieces"). What's discernible haunts us and leaves us feeling awkward, wrong for listening even. What isn't obvious — mumbled words, sounds we can't assign instruments to — subtly informs Fabulous Muscles like afterthoughts, the lucid hindsight with which we view a careless world that simultaneously allows indescribable beauty and devastating loss.

This kind of unrestrained self-exposure would have Robert Smith re-examining Faith. Given the general mood and Stewart's pained, forceful yelps, though, all Cure and Ian Curtis comparisons are warranted if meaningless. In a sentence: Jamie Stewart cuddles a stuffed cat with nary a hint of irony (skip track 5).

— Lavina Lee (lavina at flakmag dot com)