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Xiu Xiu's dark material given explosive treatment

Katjusa Cisar  —  9/06/2008 8:00 am

Xiu Xiu makes demanding, tricky music, and the small crowd that turned out Friday night at the High Noon Saloon gladly followed the whim of the band's schizophrenic fancy.

The experimental rock trio lures you in with soft and sweet melancholy. Just as dissonant chords are resolving into harmony, the percussion comes crashing down and lead singer Jamie Stewart lets out a hair-raising shriek that gives way to a cacophony of anguish. Stewart sings in a breathy, delicate voice about infant graveyards, molestation and other dark material.

It's a deceptively chaotic sound that requires a tight and controlled execution, and Xiu Xiu knows exactly when to pull back and when to let fly.

Caralee McElroy, who mainly played keyboard and flute, sang on an early song in the set, but sadly didn't sing much more after that. The addition of harmony and dissonant layering would thicken Stewart's mix of tortured whisper-singing and full-out screams. After a while, his vocals grate the ear.

The band broke out an arsenal of musical instruments, including an autoharp, flute, piccolo, gongs and a melodica (the keytar of the wind family). The talented drummer, Ches Smith, elicited a variety of complex beats from the drum set, the gongs and a nearby table of various percussive delights.

Once in a while, a sound from the stage resembled a recognizable, established genre of music (like a snatch of pounding disco beat). But Xiu Xiu is incredibly imaginative and works outside the realm of normalcy. They create emotive soundscapes and musical scenes, not songs in the traditional sense.

The same could be said (although to a much greater extent) of noise musician Prurient, a.k.a. Madison-native Dominic Fernow, who opened with a roughly 10-minute set. He kept his back to the audience the entire time, holding two microphones together in his right hand while distorting the feedback on a four-track sound board.

He rubbed the microphones against each other, swung them at the floor and hit them on a table. Meanwhile, he threw himself around and screamed unintelligible lyrics into the microphone. It was a primal howl of pain and anger and it rooted you to the floor.

The resulting roar pulsated throughout the High Noon, piercing so high in the upper registers that it sliced into eardrums, caused eyes to flutter in pain and reflexively brought tears stinging to your eyes.

The utter sonic brutality of his performance welled up demons and anger, and then rinsed them off. It was a cathartic and cleansing experience.

Katjusa Cisar  —  9/06/2008 8:00 am