Xiu Xiu have always walked the fine line between honest emotional purging and overbloated self-deprecating bathos, but on his last LP, The Air Force (2006), Jamie Stewart seemed to be stuck in the same old plot contrivances. I could appreciate some of the individual elements on it, I guess, but on the whole I found myself bored -- exactly the response that music so harrowing shouldn’t induce.

It’s not about compromising the delicate balance between noise and pop Xiu Xiu depends on -- both elements have always had equal weight. But I can’t think of another contemporary artist who wields dissonance in such a Spartan way. Call it mannerism if you like, but Xiu Xiu's music isn’t “noise” music -- at least in the traditional sense where artists forgo melody and structure in favour of texture and intuitive movement -- so much as it is baroque pop with noisy flourishes. It might sound like I’m splitting hairs here, but watch how these carefully structured noise-pop études often seem to reject any of the serendipity which always (in my view) has some role in any vanguard music. While Stewart's music is obviously intended to be unpredictable -- like how he moves without warning from a hushed whisper to an agonized scream -- over time it has become agonizingly predictable exactly how it will attempt to be jarring.

I’m not entirely sold on Women as Lovers (2008) yet -- nor am I convinced that Xiu Xiu will ever rise above the over-saturated market of idiosyncratic, insanely prolific artists to produce something really essential -- but his ongoing saga is something I’ll always follow with great interest, much like I watch Lost -- that is to say, in a somewhat perverse, abject way. The appeal of “In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall,” like the best Xiu Xiu tracks (“I Luv the Valley (OH!),” “Pox”), lies in that word that has become such a dreaded cliché in indie rock criticism since Funeral (2004): catharsis.

To be clear, for all its abrasive qualities, the band rarely achieves catharthis, preferring instead to maintain a sense of awkward tension and clenched-teeth frustration. And even on this track Stewart isn’t exactly letting go, but he is giving out: with drums that hammer out rhythms well beyond the usual Brechtian disco thump of most of his tracks, it may be the closest the band ever gets to full-on rock. It’s far from conventional, featuring hushed sections of hovering xylophone, and Stewart whispering about “crushing an ashtray into your breast” before descending into screeching synthesizers again, as if the silence marked that insatiable point between the stimulus and the pain (or pleasure, or both). Apart from that, it’s most distinguishing motif is Stewart doing a shrill kind of stuttering that suggests that if his music will always wallow in the self-consciousness of adolescence, at least he won’t be stuck reading lyrics from his diary pages.

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