Bad Mojo

Bad Mojo may be nineteen years old, but in terms of gaming, it’s a one-of-a-kind; a freakish, absurd, Kafkaesque, high-concept rough diamond of a PC adventure. The story, which is set up for you through a gloriously weird and hammily overacted FMV cutscene, is thus: you are Roger Samms (a play on Metamorphosis’s Gregor Samsa), a gobby young bloke who is moments away from running away with a suitcase of ill-gotten cash and leaving his shitty, run-down flat for good, when his soul is inexplicably transmogrified with one of the many cockroaches which infest his dilapidated building. When I first played it, I wasn’t quite sure what'd happened as I explored my new cockroach-sized world, but gradually it becomes clear that the entire game is set around your now-massive flat, and a few adjacent rooms, in search of a way back to your original body.

In the process, a story is told. The game makes heavy employment of those now-nostalgic live-action cutscenes in a number of ways, mainly in telling you what’s going on at human height, but also in flashbacks of the characters' backstories, and particularly in the assistance of a mystical oracle, who appears in the form of other thumb-sized floor-dwellers to aid you in your quest. But the game also makes good use of my favourite gaming-specific narrative technique – that of environmental storytelling. By scuttling along through bins and gutters and the nasty, hidden bits of you and your landlord’s home, little details come together to paint a fascinating and grim portrait of the few characters that populate the game. The game’s art design, and its ingenious puzzles that rely mostly on nudging things with your little insect snout rather than the traditional point-and-click mechanic, are unlike anything else I’ve ever played. Sometimes they can be a little finicky, but what adventure game isn’t? Mostly I love the world that this game presents – the environment of the disgusting apartment, with cig butts and vicious rats and spilt chemicals all over the place, is engaging and oddly charming, in a hideous sort of way.

I love the environment in this game mostly because of its originality – sure, there are a million stories where people get shrunk down and have to navigate a world where everything is now astonishingly gigantic, but there was a lot less booze and porn in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. As I said before, the entire game takes place in maybe a couple of rooms, but from this new perspective, the moulded food and the ashtrays and the monolithic furniture are all creatively put to good to use to make an engaging world full of puzzles and pitfalls, with the bodies of your dead kin indicating where you perhaps shouldn’t tread. One memorable sequence includes roaching across a sleeping character’s face, and others involve disposing of the deadly ‘rat king’ and avoiding the landlord’s now-behemothic cat. All of this is tied together with an ominous, Lynchian soundtrack by Xorcist that makes for a fitting background to the game’s gritty and dingy aesthetic, as well as adding to the game’s off-kilter and joyously weird vibe.

It’s also surprisingly well-written, or at least shows a level of interest in its story, character development, and eye for detail that countless games in our spoilt-rotten present day couldn’t hold a candle to. It’s also unafraid to mix its grimy sense of realism with straight-up magical elements and a revelry in its own ridiculousness, as with the oracle’s many cryptic clues delivered in knowingly audacious rhymes. It’s not a very long game, depending on how quickly you can figure it out, and of course it shouldn’t be, but it’s nonetheless packed with so much thought and artistry that it’s worth replaying just to immerse yourself in its bonkers little universe once again – that and the fact that it has four separate endings. But most of all, I adore just how 1990s it is. The ‘edgy’ vibe, the crazy semi-CG full motion video, the dark synthesiser soundtrack, the datedness of it all; to me, it’s beautiful, and even today it remains a breath of fresh air in one of the most derivative industries imaginable, even if that fresh air is tinged with the smell of stale cigarette smoke and rotten meat.

WATCH THE AMAZING INTRO CUTSCENE HERE

Pharmakon

Margaret Chardiet, A.K.A. Pharmakon, makes some exceptionally dark music. Stripped-down, sparse, and angrily, burningly raw, her music, a personal and minimalistic form of industrial, sounds as oppressive as the creeping horror of a medieval plague, or the mechanical operation of a death camp. It’s punishing to listen to, and carries with it the power to heavily traumatise. Chardiet is not fucking around here. Her music is a conveyor belt of stained, steely terror, and it’s an immeasurably badass collection of work.

There are two albums floating around at the moment, at least two that I know of, which are the ones that have made it into the crowded, stagnant river of the mainstream. Low in track number but loaded with thick, gloopy misery, Abandon came thundering into my life in 2013, while Bestial Burden came out last year, and in between Pharmakon herself suffered a cyst so large that it nearly killed her, and had to undergo some nasty surgery that undoubtedly added a bitter new philosophy to her already vicious style of sound. The two albums are similar in their technique, but are by no means less individual, and I find it impossible to imagine either of them becoming, y'know, stale and 'samey', even after maybe a thousand listens. Pharmakon's tracks have a recognisable formula of a bludgeoning percussive base, with a layer of unearthly atmospherics, all brought together with her maniacal vocal cords bleeding profusely over the top. She wails, she laughs, she hisses, she mutters, but she mostly screams, with the throat-splitting intensity of a believable despair that sends shivers down the spines of your ancestors. Her versatility is her greatest asset. On ‘Crawling on Bruised Knees’, for instance, she uses electronic wizardry to turn her voice into a desperate and vulnerable wobble, an absolute stroke of genius that gives her voice a jarring inhuman quality.

Occasionally her sound will descend into whirring clouds of sheer madness, as with the ghostly utterances that end the otherwise white-knuckle ‘Ache’ on the first LP, but my personal favourite is the end of ‘Bestial Burden’ itself, an already maddeningly pensive track with a ‘bass line’ that sounds like the shadow of a swinging meat pendulum, which gets thicker and thicker with ominous fear, Pharmakon’s echoing voice dithering between little-girl-lost and frustrated, roaring monstrosity, laughing and laughing until the track builds to a whirlwind of laughter, screams, white noise and distorted hellish lunacy that closes a brilliantly brutal album. Bestial Burden, the album, is a masterwork. Pharmakon herself described it as her ‘desire to show the body as 'a lump of flesh and cells that mutate and betray you’, with one of the tracks even being named ‘Body Betrays Itself’, and sounds like the inevitable approach of an invisible enemy. In many ways, this shows how Bestial Burden is a piece of autobiography as well as an ambient horrorshow. There are less attempts at witchy darkness on this LP, as there were with ‘Pitted’, for instance, and instead the album is more concerned with being grounded in the material reality where the human body can spontaneously murder itself, as shown by adding the suffocating sounds of panic-attack breathing and a long section of someone coughing up something disgusting. It’s stunning, in the sense of the final moments of an ill-fated cow in a sheet-metal slaughterhouse.

Pharmakon’s music is terrifying, electrifying, powerful, vulnerable, heartfelt and cruel. She may be the result of a long line of horrifying factory-music predecessors, but it’s undeniable that in her thus-far brief body of inspiringly abominable work, Chardiet has built herself a recognisable and immense style whereby both her body and soul are hung from sharpened staves and hoisted over a throbbing landscape of genuine and palpable human misery. If that sounds like the sort of listening experience that would fascinate you beyond belief, as it does me, then I highly recommend you check her out. But beware: if there’s any music that truly isn’t for the faint of heart, it’s these two magnificent albums.

Serial Experiments: Lain

Peerless, prophetic, and almost totally impenetrable, Serial Experiments: Lain is a bizarrely idiosyncratic anime which shines a flickering spotlight on the consequences of our modern-day interconnectedness, and may or may not be ‘about’ a number of complex topics, including technology, identity, religion, isolation, reality and death. It’s also an immensely satisfying thrill ride of disturbing imagery and unabashed weirdness, famed for being bafflingly incomprehensible and deeply unsettling. Lain makes no attempts to allow its story reach you in any form that isn’t the subtlest, most chilling kind of quiet exposition. There is absolutely zero spoon-feeding. Because of this, Lain is often chastised for being so barmy that it raises the question of whether its supposed storyline or inherent ‘meaning’ can truly be said to exist, which I can’t stomach for two reasons: one, to assume that such a dense piece of ball-gripping art was made without any intent or purpose is pretty unfair on the kinds of people who make things as mentally challenging as Lain, and two, it’s hard to believe that the developers would’ve put so much effort into making this series look and feel so awe-strikingly beautiful if they hadn’t had a specific soul and purpose in mind, whether it’s one that can be easily put into words or not.

Lain is an anime series that has no other direction in which to categorise itself in than the broad but brilliant ‘psychological’ genre of anime, which also houses other popular mindfucks such as Death Note, Ergo Proxy, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. But unlike those other examples, Lain is way further out in the stratosphere of intellectually demanding strangeness. The initial setup is thus: Lain is a quiet and introverted schoolgirl who is contacted one day via text message by her classmate Chisa, who not long ago committed suicide. Chisa explains that she is not actually dead, but has simply left her material body to become part of the ‘Wired’, the series’ name for its wacked-out version of our modern internet, where she claims that God exists. Chisa appears to Lain again in terrifying visions, and eventually Lain decides to buy herself a PC (known in the series as a ‘Navi’) and become a part of this strange new electronic frontier. The rest of the story is up for debate – a lot happens, but in terms of what exactly happens, none of us can be too sure. But, like the best David Lynch movies, although you might not have wrapped your head around the exact nature of what’s going on in front of you, it’s made with such a deft and assured confidence that you’re enthralled nonetheless, and can also enjoy the unique pleasure of picking it apart in your mind months after you first watch it. The atmosphere that the show creates is deep and dark and emotionally arresting, and even without going into the arguably less interesting intellectual side of the series, it’s the relentless menace of the show’s feel which makes it completely unforgettable.

The series is also years ahead of its time, either a testament to the genius of its inventors, or of technology’s place in contemporary Japanese culture. Or, y’know, both. Lain was first broadcast in 1998, but the way in which the ‘Wired’ is portrayed throughout the series is eerily reminiscent of a mindset well into the age of Web 2.0 and our now-ubiquitous social media. The scenes that are set ‘within’ the Wired are intensely surreal, a virtual phantasmagoria with disembodied human parts and weird dreamlike personifications. It’s never entirely clear whether the Wired is a vast virtual-reality-type space, or whether this is all animated symbolism of the bog-standard online communication we know and love today. References are also made to how much the Wired is beginning to creep out from the world of ones and zeroes and is into our own reality, which, if taking the Wired to be synonymous with the internet, is unquestionably the state we find ourselves in nowadays, where the internet has come to affect almost everything in the so-called ‘real’ world. Exactly what the point is that Lain is making about the dawn of information age is, of course, unclear. Most of the time, though, it feels as if it’s suggesting that all of this is a bad thing – such as with the inconsistency of Lain’s identity, for instance, whereby she can no longer keep track of her online personality anymore, nor where reality ends and the Wired begins. Also, as the series progresses, Lain’s obsession with the Wired develops to insane heights, as embodied in the progression of her beautifully-designed supercomputer, which grows from a simple desktop PC into a monstrous, room-sized organism. The series imagines a world where humankind transcends itself through technological means, but provides no obvious moral message, which is undoubtedly one of its main strengths.

It’s also worth giving a mention to Lain herself, a protagonist who has little to say compared to most other exposition-spewing anime central characters, and yet she never feels too distant, and the mystery behind her overall objective in the series becomes yet another corridor of interest, rather than a narrative weakness. Her personality is split between her shy and lonely offline personality, and the newfound confidence that she finds – or may have been there all along? – through the vast channels of the Wired, and most of the time she seems as confused as the audience as to what exactly is going on with herself. Her identity as an unhappy loner is made perfectly clear, with her empty, soulless bedroom and her mistake of failing to ‘dress like a grownup’ when her airheaded semi-friends take her out clubbing (to the awesomely-named ‘Cyberia’). It’s clear that there is something special about Lain with regards to her role in the story, although I’m not exactly sure how, as shady agencies, hackers and other underworld figures all take a particular interest in her. However, as much as the show hints that there might be some Neo-esque chosen-one nonsense going on, it’s the scenes of Lain as an ordinary girl navigating a new and unusual world, both in the Wired and in the real world, that work the best. Lain’s relationship with her something’s-not-quite-right family also makes for some of the most unnerving scenes and subplots in the entire series.

I’m head-over-heels in love with this show. Every aspect of it shines with a dark and murky brilliance. The gloriously nuanced artwork, and the production, particularly the sound engineering, which sets every mood with unsettling precision, are all immaculate. It’s cryptic, and yet it’s still utterly engaging. It’s alien, and yet if you strain your ears, you can hear the distant echoes of exactly what it’s trying to say. It has moment after moment of masterfully chilling and eerie scenes and set-pieces. There are so many depths to it, and it’s the first anime I’d point to if you’re looking for something that’s weird, but never stupid. Serial Experiments: Lain is a one-of-a-kind, and though there are a few things you can try and compare it to, it has the distinct honour of being a true original. If you’re like me, and nothing gets you off like the feeling of having your mind rummaged about in and being left pleasantly disturbed, then watching Lain is a particularly special and memorable experience. Others may be turned off by the lack of being able to understand what the fuck’s going on, but I reckon that even if you’re left feeling as confused as a demented rabbit, you’ll still be gripped and entertained by the sheer absurdity of the whole thing. It’s one of my favourite things ever, ever, ever, and if anything I’ve said in the past five paragraphs has piqued your interest, then I suggest you find the means to watch it right this minute, preferably at night and completely alone.

WATCH THE TRAILER (dubbed)

Dawn of a New Blog

So here's another blog, where I'll be dumping any articles I feel like writing, probably mostly reviews of things I already know I'm in love with - I reckon Serial Experiments: Lain is gonna be the first one, then who knows? Expect big, chunky paragraphs and meandering sentences. If you're wondering what the 'old' blogs were to constitute my declaring this a 'new' blog, have a look at drinkaloneradio.blogspot.com. I think the even older ones were deactivated. Be critical if you want, most of this is practice anyway. Praise be to Yevon.

EMA - The Future's Void

EMA, that is Erika M. Anderson, formerly of depressing experimental drug-rock duo Gowns, made ripples on the hipster sea back in 2011 with her solo debut, Past Life Martyred Saints, which was an absolute stonker of an album; heartfelt in its distress, personal yet otherworldly, and packed with gloriously bold levels of variety, from the bonkers to the beautiful. Three years later, she’s back with The Future’s Void, a matter-of-factly polemic title which betrays this second album’s overarching theme of our exciting new maybe-dystopian lives in the Information Age and beyond. The new world order forming around us in the wake of the Internet Revolution has become an alluring concept for artists of all kinds across the globe, all of whom are undoubtedly hoping – as much as they might deny it – to be the ones to truly encapsulate the zeitgeist of this exciting and bewildering period of human history. The Future’s Void is an album that retains the exasperated angst of its predecessor, but throws it into a more ambitious thematic scope, with interesting and varied results.

I was faintly disappointed when I read the album title, saw the Oculus on the cover, listened to a couple of the tracks and realised that this was an album with a ‘modern life’ sort of concept, since I’d fallen in love with EMA on her last album thanks to her offerings of those more timeless and analog miseries like abuse, emptiness and self-harm, which made no attempts to be topical or generational, and were the all the greater for that. Immediately, on The Future’s Void, you can tell that the more personal side of Anderson’s songwriting has been compromised, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and second albums that fail to deviate from those before them run the risk of sounding creatively stagnant, for me EMA’s – and in fact Gowns’ – appeal was the personal touch that made all the heartache in the songs truly palpable. Not to mention the fact that writing any music about ‘the Internet’ is cause for alarm. Shit, my last review was of St. Vincent’s self-titled tirade about life in the Twitter epoch, and songs like ‘Digital Witness’ are a singularly rare success in this area.

But enough moaning about boring things like ‘themes’ and ‘ideas’, let’s talk about the music, shall we? Past Life Martyred Saints had a thrillingly eclectic range of sounds – folky guitars, thundering drums, graceless space-age synthesisers – and this continues in much the same vein here. However, the real warhead in Anderson’s arsenal is her voice – capable at performing a decent tune, sure, but also a material in itself to be manipulated and layered into a variety of forms. Unlike another Anderson, the one from The Knife with the extra ‘s’, EMA doesn’t mangle her voice or distort it beyond its humanity. Instead, all throughout this album, most notably on tracks like ‘Solace’ and ‘Satellites’, Anderson is joined by a choir of herself, creating vocal sections that are lushly put together, and make her raspy inflection all the sweeter to listen to. Whether she’s going grunge on ‘So Blonde’, industrial on ‘Smoulder’, or soft as a whisper on ‘3Jane’, it’s Anderson’s voice which really succeeds in drawing the emotion out of her songs, and every line is sang with conviction – cool, clamouring, disinterested and desperate all at the same time.

The opener, ‘Satellites’, is a marvellously apocalyptic call-to-arms with deranged movements from tragic choral interludes to whistling distortion and a death-knell bass tone. ‘So Blonde’ is plucked straight out of the nineties, awesome or derivative depending on your cynicism. ‘3Jane’ is a lost-sounding and reflective ballad that might just be the album’s highlight, misty-eyed and beautifully sung. On her blog, Anderson described ‘3Jane’ as the ‘lyrical centrepiece of the record’, and talks about trying to control her online image while living in constant worry of having a visible online presence now that cunts like me are finding out who she is. ‘It’s all just a big advertising campaign’, she bemoans wistfully on the record. ‘Disassociation, I guess it’s just a modern disease’. It might all sounds a little preachy, but it’s sang with such bored surrender that it kills to listen to. ‘I get stressed out and I wanna get high / it’s cos I’ve seen my face and I don’t recognise the person that I feel inside’. Anderson’s lyrics are unrefined and directly talk about ‘selfies’ and ‘interwebs’ with an artistic-mindedness that might make some internet users a little uncomfortable, but I find them captivating. Some of the lyrics, apparently, didn’t even make it past being made up on the spot, and I like this rough-around-the-edges quality, as well as the imagery of lines like ‘we just smoulder where the flames went out’, even if the intended mondegreens of ‘earn/urn’ and ‘might lose some fur/my Lucifer’ are a bit befuddling at times.

EMA seems to be reaching for the bigger-sounding tracks on this album. ‘Satellites’, as mentioned before, intends to be as stratospheric as its title, and ‘Smoulder’ is slow and sweeping and satisfyingly grand. Perhaps the weakest effort on the album is ‘Cthulu’, which is appropriately aiming for largeness and impact, but its constant, repeated hook doesn’t generate the gravitas that its creator might’ve originally hoped, and its epic denouement would’ve been more effective had it been built on sturdier foundations. It’s not like EMA can’t write long, huge-sounding songs – ‘Grey Ship’, from the previous album, is a mind-blowing affair, as is Gowns masterpiece ‘White Like Heaven’, but ‘Cthulu’ isn’t great. ‘Neuromancer’ is better, with its stomping drumbeat backed up by machine-gun fire, but all of these big-arena belters, for all their volume, are missing the emotional impact that comes with EMA’s more understated material. Conversely, the ringing piano chords on ‘100 Years’ are as deathly quiet and sombre as a distant church bell on a misty morning, and although Anderson is singing about something as big and important as the state of the world at the moment (‘How it shudders from its expanding’), the effect is serene, yet deeply haunting.

Returning to the idea that this is an album that’s ‘about things’, I’m relieve to say that for all the stumbles that EMA seems to be making in creating an album with a whole lot more ambition than her previous effort, mostly concentrated in the more anthemic offerings, there’s plenty of good shit here, and Anderson’s talent for interesting sounds and lyrics hasn’t diminished since people started learning her name. ‘Solace’ is an absolute triumph, for instance, soaring and cathartic in a way that the grander songs on the album never manage, pulling your ears to attention with a catchy chorus, a bubbling synth hook and its madcap percussive debris. The album ends with its most evidently ‘of the times’ effort – ‘Dead Celebrity’, which could’ve been a whole lot more trite if it wasn’t for its bastardised riff on the Last Post, its climactic fireworks display and lyrics like ‘we wanted something timeless in a world so full of speed’ – all awesome. Songs that reference the controversial selfie and clicking on links might still be hard to get used to as the Internet envelops our lives more and more, and as far as trying to make a topical statement on this generation of avatars and statuses goes, EMA hasn’t quite cemented a totally coherent point anywhere here, but her songs are still as excitingly bold as ever, and her style and lyrics as simple yet affecting as in her masterful debut. It’s not as good as Past Life Martyred Saints, but maybe nothing will be.

EMA - Satellites

St. Vincent - St. Vincent

A track title like ‘Birth in Reverse’ doesn’t create the most appealing mental image, but such is the surreal wonderland of Annie Clark’s imagination, where darkness hums beneath a colourful lustre of charming and cheerful eccentricity. Historically, St. Vincent’s sound played like a neurotic Disney soundtrack; beautiful and stargazy, even angelic, but harbouring a real edge, like a razorblade buried in a bowl of sherbert. In the five years since then her confidence has an artist has skyrocketed, and she continues with the magical strangeness of her unique musical personality, only this time with a heightened sense of awareness and self-assurance. While her previous albums always had a youthful shyness about them, the St. Vincent we have with us here today is her same recognisably oddball self, but the coyness present on her previous releases has vanished. It’s all there on the album cover – staring confidently out at you from her throne, with her majestic gown and her snow-queen hairstyle. This is a self-titled album, after all, and all of this seems to indicate a bold new direction for gorgeously-minded superstar St. Vincent, and here, after four(ish) long years since she last haunted the minds of every hipster in the Western world, she's back with a pink, kitsch dreadnought of an album.

Upon immediate first listen, then, this album signals a change of course in Clark’s artistic trajectory beyond the classically wistful coffee-shop insecurity that we all fell in love with from the Marry Me era onwards, and instead seems to have moved definitively towards a new frontier of futuristic kitsch, a retrofuturistic combination of the 1980s, the 2010s, and god knows when and what else. After all, here in 2014, the world is in the throes of a particularly futuristic-looking and breakneck-fast transition into god knows what, and this album’s standard-bearer ‘Digital Witness’ is probably the most apparent instance of St. Vincent looking outward as opposed to inward, as the entire song sounds, at least from one interpretation, like a sarcastic diatribe about our newfound obsession with validating our own lives in the abstract world of social media: “If I can’t show it, you can’t see me, what’s the point of doing anything?” The spreading tendrils of the internet have been the cause of immense social and cultural upheaval amongst the human race for the past twenty years or so, but so far St. Vincent is the only musician I’ve heard who has managed to address this revolution directly and effectively, as if she’s not even trying. “Pleasure.loathing.huey.newton” she coos in the song where the late Black Panther is “entombed in a shrine of zeroes and ones” – and she’s right; he’s staring out at me from his Wikipedia page as we speak.

I’ve never given her much credit for this before, but Annie Clark is an incredibly nuanced lyricist as well as a musical prodigy. There’s a lot being said in her metaphor-laden verses and choruses that I dread to think has gone unnoticed by my own self, but the depth of lines such as “a smile is more than showing teeth” and the syllabic revelry of lines like “summer is as faded as a lone cicada call” reveal a St. Vincent as dextrous in the brain as in her guitar-slaying fingers. Her collaborator and friend, New Wave Grand Duke David Byrne, says that “despite having toured with her for almost a year, I don’t think I know her much better, at least on a personal level”, so as a mere musical civilian I expect that trying to find a path via this album into the machinations of Annie Clark herself and all of her possibly intended meanings may end up proving fruitless, but imagery like “headless heroes heaped by the pylons as a careless sun sets on the West” is semantic dynamite, and this album is as lyrically dense and ferocious as Strange Mercy, if not impressively superior. The world that these songs inhabit is bright, colourful, and uncannily strange in its representation of the modern life of its creator.

Annie Clark’s always been talented, there’s never been any doubt about that, but it’s instantly apparent that on the musical side of her fourth album, she’s upped her own creative ante. Her Renaissance-woman arsenal of abilities is sharpened to divine levels; this album is an absolute wealth of sounds, instruments, moods and movements, all arranged, performed and produced tightly and with a clear embrace of the buzzing-metal-and-plastic sound she’s built out of the synthesiser love carried over from the last album. ‘Bring Me Your Loves’ is a stomper; the sound of St. Vincent thrashing around a chaotic chamber of whirrs, crackles and hisses, sounding as far removed from her human side as she’s dared to stray yet. ‘I Prefer Your Love’ is a stopping-point halfway through the album, a break from the laser-light synths and roaring guitars, it’s a ballad dedicated to her mum where she tells her “all the good in me is because of you” (how bloody sweet is that, aw); soft and shimmering and lovely in contrast to the track formerly mentioned. ‘Birth in Reverse’ is noisy and shrill but somehow St. Vincent has this ability to find beautiful melody in the sharpest and strangest artificial sounds, tied together with her voice that is part desperation, part confidence, part siren. The mythological kind.

With this album, St. Vincent has gone nuclear. Marry Me and Actor were sparkling drops of acid wistfulness, Strange Mercy was sadder, sharper and better, and while I’m not saying that this newest effort is definitively better than Strange Mercy in any way, shape or form, it has a clarity in its construction – the observant internet-age futurism, the blending of usual art-indie songwriting with weirder sounds and elements, the swift and effortless transitions between notably different but consistently vibrant moods. You can tell that this is an album that’s going to cement St. Vincent’s place in the pantheon of this slice of history’s acclaimed musicians. She’s ferociously gifted, in weaving her music, in sculpting her own image, in making songs from the (don’t vomit) ‘art-rock’ side of the playing field that can be beautiful, ferocious, uplifting, tense, abrasive, soft and electrifying all at once; exciting to witness, and so uniquely St. Vincent. I’d be surprised if there was an ear on the planet who didn’t find something joyous to step to in this LP, which has proven that if you’re searching for a modern-day musical idol to venerate, you could do a fucktonne of a lot worse than Annie Clark.

St. Vincent - Digital Witness

Xiu Xiu - Angel Guts: Red Classroom

Xiu Xiu are a bizarrely eccentric little enclave of a band, and as such they are an entity which can only cater exclusively to a certain type – and I don’t mean that in some sort of exclusively superior hipster-generation sort of way, mainly because the ‘certain type’ of crowd who get the greatest genuine thrill out of Xiu Xiu are probably not the kind of people who anyone would want to be, and it most certainly isn’t the sort of music to impress your friends with. I’m sure that you can figure out within seconds of listening whether Jamie Stewart and company’s sometimes mystifyingly nutty blend of nightmarish soul-stripping and unapologetically avant-garde weirdness is right up your dark, dingy alley or not. I’ve always been a tremendous admirer of Xiu Xiu, both for their wacky experimentation that makes every album salted with novelty and for Stewart’s ability to create works of absolute harrowing genius; frequently disturbing, sometimes startlingly bleak.

Saying that, however, despite Xiu Xiu having produced some of the most gut-wrenchingly sad and suffocatingly desperate music I’ve ever heard, it isn’t all darkness, they’ve always had a playful side, even if it is a mental one. How else would you explain track titles like ‘I Luv Abortion’ and videos like this one? In recent releases they’ve even sounded fairly, well, jovial (at least musically if not lyrically), as with ‘Chocolate Makes You Happy’ and ‘I Do What I Want, When I Want’. But on this latest release, all those possible instances of not-necessarily-suicidal music have been totally extinguished from consideration. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is the most overtly grim Xiu Xiu album in years. Every track is a lights-off, reverberated, doom-laden sadness exercise. This isn’t a collection of songs to be enjoyed so much as to be endured, decorating their strange and experimental soundscape with impassioned screaming, rumbling bassy synths, chopped vocals, ear-splitting electronic dissonance and squealing pig samples. Make no mistake, this is pure serial-killer territory, and the focus isn’t so much on the sad side of things as on creating a genuinely disturbing, viscerally haunting, terrifying experience, which has always been a common characteristic of Xiu Xiu, but here that beloved element is bolstered to a thousand degrees.

Sounds good, right? I mean, I love dark music, as do a lot of people, and in the past Xiu Xiu have gifted me with music darker and more uniquely fucked-up than much else I could think of. However, just because something’s pushing itself as far down the well of darkness as it can reach, it doesn’t necessarily produce stellar results, and to be frank, Angel Guts: Red Classroom, while it did leave me adequately disturbed, it also left me - spoiler alert - ultimately a little unimpressed. It’s not that the crew aren’t trying or aren’t putting as much creativity into their zero-rules method of experimental song-crafting; by all means, there’s still plenty of successful bouts of madness. ‘Stupid in the Dark’ is probably the one song most resembling an actual song, though it doesn’t lose any of its raw appeal by any means, and as a result it’s one of my favourites – it’s hard not to love the gothic hum of the synthesisers. Meanwhile ‘Adult Friends’ has some joyously fucked-up psychosexual issues (The line where touching breasts ‘is like a lobster crawling over my arm’ is delivered so straight that it works), and ‘El Naco’ is frightening to the point of nausea, leading me to believe that whether or not you take pleasure in listening to this sort of thing probably says a lot about you as a person (It probably says plenty about me). There’s nothing here that reaches the perfection of classic songs like, say, ‘Apistat Commander’ (although that is a difficult one to beat for sheer suicidal brilliance), but fans of horrific sounds will be treated and then some.

In terms of Xiu Xiu’s more quotation-marks ‘artistic’ dalliances, my feelings on this facet of the band’s avant-garde sensibilities are just as ambivalent as ever. A band called Joy Division created similarly dark, cuttingly sad music, but did so with an air of absolute dignity. Xiu Xiu spit out dignity. Part of the joy of listening to Xiu Xiu as a group who express dark feelings (to put it mildly) is that Jamie Stewart and his transient entourage have never held back and have never reined it in – their music is bold and it’s ridiculous and it’s so melodramatic that it almost seems perfectly pitched, and all this is why they manage to reach naked depths of the human soul inconceivable to other bands. This is also their biggest problem, of course, as to anyone who isn’t all that into it, the bewildering artiness that comes with this mentality probably looks like that episode of Spaced, and even to a fan like me, it can get tiresome to have your otherwise beautifully despondent piece of heart-skewering spoiled by the occasional lyric that just pushes it too far for you to go along with it. Here, the lyrics are so overshadowed by the screaming presence of the music that it’s not such a gigantic problem, but in a sense it’s gone the other direction – now the music is so batshit insane that it’s more pulverising than satisfying, though I guess Xiu Xiu have made no pretences of being easy listening.

This album’s undoubtedly another treasure trove for Xiu Xiu fans more dedicated than I am, but for me it’s hard work, and for light listeners it’s probably way too much. ‘The Silver Platter’, for instance, is like watching Suspiria in the dark, on acid, whilst being gently molested. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is guaranteed to be a difficult listen, and not just in the ‘how-much-can-you-handle’ sort of way. There are just a few lulls in its aggravated despair, particularly the moody but almost quaintly beautiful ‘Bitter Melon’, and although I can heartily commend its invention and the sheer breadth of its fuck-it-let’s-just-do-it horror, it’s patchy and it’s a little tiring and all its terrifying elements would probably sound a lot more powerful if there was a little more variation from its unremitting atrocity-diving. Whether you respond to ‘Black Dick’ with unimpressed laughter or paranoid horror is a good litmus test for whether this stuff’s for you. If you’re looking for something upsetting, then by all means, you’re in luck, but even though it’s arguably Xiu Xiu’s darkest and most psychotic album yet - which really is saying something – I can’t help but feel that it’s not one of their greatest.

Xiu Xiu - Stupid in the Dark