Xiu Xiu ‘Ignore Grief’ Review: A Bleak Attempt at Healing the Traumatized Mind

Xiu Xiu’s 2021 album Oh No stood out among the band’s crowded discography for its near-absence of shock moments, a la “I Luv Abortion” from 2012’s Always. The American experimental art rockers were, it seemed, finally chilling out in their middle age. The group’s follow-up, however, quickly goes about disproving that notion.

Ignore Grief is a bleak, thoroughly harrowing examination of a traumatized mind, with its lyrics consistently teetering between dark fantasy and grim reality throughout its runtime. On “Maeby Baeby,” Angela Seo sings—or rather, mumbles—about a young child confiding in a tarantula while hiding under the bed, trying to escape an abusive parent. “If you scare him away, I will get a tarantula tattoo,” says the desperate young narrator to the creature, all the while expecting to be hurt yet again: “If you need to bite me, I will understand.”

Xiu Xiu’s 2004 album Fabulous Muscles unflinchingly explored abuse, addiction, and depression in an effort by founding member Jamie Stewart to work through what was, according to the artist, an “incredibly violent, incredibly jarring” period of his life. Ignore Grief, though, looks to the horrible experiences of other (unnamed) people in Xiu Xiu’s orbit, hoping to provide them, as well as themselves, with some form of cathartic release. The intentions are noble, but the album often struggles to reconcile the band’s penchant for shock with their desire to soothe the battered hearts of those whose lives have been afflicted by tragedy.

Xiu Xiu has always been at home in moral and artistic in-betweens, their sound strewn somewhere across the stylistic continuum of abrasive, artsy rock music. But on Ignore Grief, the thematic and aesthetic nook they’ve carved out often feels lurid and unpleasant, with few moments of tenderness to alleviate its crushingly hideous atmosphere.

The industrial ugliness that permeates album opener “The Real Chaos Cha Cha Cha” plays like a slightly less deranged take on the pulverizing power electronics of English noise act Whitehouse, its hauntingly apocalyptic aural barrage conjured from the darkest recesses of the id. Seo, who takes over half of the album’s vocal duties, describes a scene of domestic abuse—“He beat she too bad/What a godawful wonder is man”—as a punishing amalgam of glass bottle percussion, digital screeches, and fragmented drum rolls unfurls eerily around her. Conversely, “Pahrump” augments its ominous organ drones with Stewart’s curdled vocals and a chaotic saxophone in a wonderfully vulgar parody of the transcendent qualities associated with the instrument via its connection to jazz legends like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

Unfortunately, some of Ignore Grief’s bold musical hostility is undercut by the relentless traumacore glossolalia of the album’s lyrics. On “Brothel Creeper,” Seo stammers about poison apples and scalping knives, but the abstract sentence fragments fail to evoke anything beyond an exceptionally vague sense of mild discomfort. Similarly, “Esquerita, Little Richard” is essentially the stuff of seemingly meaningless goth poems: “Poor little head/My mind is not where it belongs…Ceded, between death and not death.”

Xiu Xiu’s successful excursions into contemporary classical music might just be Ignore Grief’s most pleasant surprise, though they don’t always hit that mark either. While “Dracula Parrot, Moon Moth” creaks with unbearable menace and insanity, the Neue Musik-inflected “666 Photos of Nothing” feels tangential and unfocused, getting too caught up in textural experimentation and bizarre stream-of-consciousness poetry to cohere. Even a superficially compelling cut like closer “For M.” reveals itself to be more aimless than enticingly opaque.

Ignore Grief sees Xiu Xiu returning, or perhaps regressing, to the murky hellscape of their earlier work. The provocations that proved so cutting on albums like 2006’s The Air Force and 2010’s Dear God, I Hate Myself have dulled somewhat, with the group’s new bag of musical tricks only occasionally managing to pick up the slack.