Xiu Xiu – ‘Angel Guts: Red Classroom’

The third album from Jamie Stewart in under a year

This is hardly the place for armchair psychoanalysis, but it’s tempting to ponder quite what makes Xiu Xiu’s founding member Jamie Stewart tick. Specifically, if the suicidal impulses he’s frequently discussed in public serve to fuel his startling creativity. ‘Angel Guts: Red Classroom’ is his third album in under a year, and superficially it resembles many of Xiu Xiu’s others by draping wracked and fragile vocals over obtuse electronics and analogue atonality. However, Stewart and musical partner Angela Seo venture further than ever before into realms of horror-soundtrack psychodrama (‘El Naco’), while a kinship with serious-face industrial technoheads like Vatican Shadow is suggested by ‘The Silver Platter’’s raw, pulsating drum machines and the deranged gibbering over a stuck-CD beat on ‘Cinthya’s Unisex’.

Noel Gardner

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