The West Coast is falling and Xiu Xiu's going down with it

Xiu Xiu is a decisively weird, little band from San Jose, Calif. Playing its records for company is like a litmus test for what kind of person is at hand. Responses usually come in the opposed spheres of "what the hell" awe and "I don't get it" disgust. \nXiu Xiu's equally peculiar frontman Jamie Stewart wrote via an email interview, "I never understood why anyone would bother consciously setting out to repeat someone else's feelings and artistic implosions. All of the records that I have loved have been by people who did something new. So while sonically Xiu Xiu might not sound like them (although some we surely do) we very very much want to imitate the spirit (I am not sure of how else to say it) of people who do and have done new things."\nWhat Stewart and his band are doing is something quite different indeed. At once, Xiu Xiu's music is giving personality to the prefab nature of techno and fearlessly updating the inert sounds of folk music. Experimenting with tape loops and programmed beats is one thing, but as the band has progressed and gained a grounding in strong song compositions and uncomfortably personal lyrics it has launched to the forefront of the West Coast art-rock movement. A place it shares with labelmates and sometimes collaborators, the Shaggs-inspired, Deerhoof.\nXiu Xiu takes its name from Joan Chen's 1998 film "Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl." The film is the story of a young Chinese girl who is taken from her home as part of a government program, overworked, lied to, raped and eventually kills herself; a totally dismal affair. \nStewart explained the connection: "That movie is like what the songs we were trying to do insofar as it has no resolution and is totally unsymbolic insofar as it is a direct narrative of events. It is the most depressing movie I have ever seen. It fit in a lot with things going on in that it offers no explanation of how awful life can be or how touching. It just is."\nIn 2000, with friends and former band members from the San Jose vicinity, Stewart, Cory McCullough, Yvonne Chen and Lauren Andrews began to form the germ of the idea. Their debut record, Knife Play, was released in 2002 on the Olympia-based 5 Rue Christine label. It was a bewildering and scattered record, with influences from gamelan percussion (a Javanese style of music centered around gongs), Stewart's goth-like vocals and some straightforward, akimbo post-punk. Knife Play was a wellspring of fascinating moments, but failed in being a fully realized work.\nAfter the idea-heavy, more computerized EP Chapel of the Chimes (also released in 2002); Xiu Xiu came out with A Promise this February, an album of unparalleled originality. Pulling together the disparity of its condition, A Promise is unabashedly sad and modernly poetic. Stewart often refers to specific people, friends and relatives of his, in the songs, making the album feel like an aural diorama of a Hubert Selby novel.\n"A lot of REALLY bad things for some reason happened and continue to myself and members of Xiu Xiu and people over a short period of time and it is a way to stare at them and document them and man I do not know why," Stewart writes of his subject matter. "Life is too much sometimes that there is not a lot else to do. It is not to make people feel uncomfortable, to like freak out the squares, it is just what is up right now."\nIndicative of what A Promise holds in store is the cover art, a photo of a naked Vietnamese boy on a bed holding an upside down baby doll. "I was on vacation in Vietnam and the person on the cover kept pestering me to have sex with him for money, but I offered him the pose instead. He thought it was fine or at least said he did. The photo and whole thing felt so confusing and intense. It was beautiful and exploitive and scary and a little funny and depressing and sad and exciting. I have no idea whether it was right or wrong to do it." \nStewart, a preschool employee by day, is the son of record producer Michael Stewart, whose greatest claim to fame is from his production work on Billy Joel's Piano Man album. Jamie has confirmed that he learned from his father that music could never go too far. Consequently, Xiu Xiu has been praised or damned for its plethoric depictions of the sad and disturbed. Stewart often sounds insanely out of his head, like a drunk and drugged Ian Curtis dangling from his lariat in the kitchen.\nSecuring a comparison to the dead Joy Division singer is the last song on A Promise, a terror-inducing track called "Ian Curtis Wishlist." Over a calming and repetitive cello, Stewart literally kicks and screams a manifesto of love and disappointment. Just before turning into monstrous explosion of sound, he yelps, "'DO YA LUV ME, JAMIE STEWART?!'/Jane S. I am kidding/I'm just KIDDING!"\n"I was super, super, super drunk and super, super, super heart broken," Stewart writes. "I had fallen for the woman named in the song Jane S. and she had been the first person I had liked in four years and she very politely declined and I felt like such an ass for being so unrealistic and excited and for trying. It was a horrible combination of being lonely and embarrassed. I heroically and in keeping with the uber, uber angst party I was in the middle of wrote a poem about it on the bus, got wasted and recorded the vocals. YEAH!!!!!!!! Later on my best friend fucked Jane S. and then lied to me about it. That song never ends."\n"We are just trying to make music that is honest to us and sometimes it works and sometimes it sucks."\nWith a tour with Devendra Banhart this summer, a new limited edition, mini album, Fag Patrol, just out and an upcoming full-length in February 2004, Xiu Xiu is displaying remarkable imagination and prolificacy. Possibly, Jamie Stewart will be defining new parameters of happiness soon. Highly unlikely, though, as dourness seems to be a virtue in his world.