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Feb 06, 2019 Web Exclusive By Lee Adcock

Jamie Stewart had rested on his laurels for a while. Though 2017’s Forget challenged gender norms and flayed a few nerves, reigning electroclash champs Xiu Xiu toned down the jump scares and turned in a rather seductive trip, with much of the same color swathes from 2014’s Angel Guts: Red Classroom. With Girl with Basket of Fruit, Stewart has carpet-bombed his own industrial treadmills beyond recognition. Instead, a battery of percussion rips through like shrapnel, ranging from the power drill terrorism of SPK to the icy glare of Death Grips and Clipping. The name might suggest a classical painting—and the velvety, Arthur Russell-like violin in “Amargi ve Moo” almost creates that vibe—but Girl with Basket of Fruit instead paints a savage cubist picture of atrocities committed against women.

This is not, I repeat, NOT an easy album to listen to, on any level. And to some extent, that’s the point. Both the title track and its follow-up “It Comes Out as a Joke” employ abstract obscenities to describe rape (like “every frog climbs up a butthole”). “Mary Turner, Mary Turner,” meanwhile, literally hammers home the true story of a young black woman who was lynched in 1919 with her unborn child. As Stewart reminds us with a bitter curse—“Fuck your guns, fuck your war, fuck your truck, fuck your flag”—the mobs that set Turner ablaze still lurk among today’s white nationalists. And the shuddering drum circle of lead single “Scisssssssors” conflates our bloodthirsty healthcare system with euthanasia: “light a candle/pull the handle/you are erased.”

For the most part, Girl with Basket of Fruit holds together with a strange logic. Granted, the flippant drum-and-bass assault “Pumpkin Attack on Mommy and Dad” seems wildly out of place, like a neon yellow suit at a funeral. Otherwise, Xiu Xiu sends a necessary shock into the static indie circuit. Stewart’s machete may lop off sensitive ears, but here he cuts deep into centuries of unmerited violence, proving that women still have more uphill battles to face. (www.xiuxiu.org)

Author rating: 7.5/10