First one's free

A continuation of my interview with Freddy, in which we discuss our love of Xiu Xiu, plus the first episode of Trauma Angel Radio

I guess even self-loathing clowns need to eat

Unfortunately, that even includes me. As I work in an industry with inconsistent hours and wages (since tips account for more than half of my income and our “off season” lasts about six months), this newsletter’s funding can literally keep a roof over my head. It’s not obligatory for anyone who reads or visits to spend money and I’m going to make sure that all major features are free. It goes against everything I value to gatekeep good writing, both because I want my words to be read and there’s also the fact that I myself am typically too poor to spend money on most things. This year I’m not even celebrating holidays. It’s not a source of pity or sadness, just a reality that’s all too common for most of us.

That said, I do plan on having short snippets of interviews, insights, and playlists included as a sort of “thank you” feature for folks who opt to spend their hard-earned cash on supporting my work as a writer. The nature of these extras may shift with time, just as the newsletter itself may do the same, but I plan on always including a monthly playlist. The first few playlists are going to look a bit different from my ideal form because my old USB microphone kicked the bucket. I got it in 2013 and I’ve accepted that eleven’s a reasonable lifespan for something that cost me eighty dollars. I’ll be replacing it as soon as I’m able, but for now my mixes won’t have “air break” moments where I introduce songs and allow for more fluid tonal shifts. Instead, I’ve created a seamless mix of thirteen songs for you to enjoy. It keeps the mood more consistent and genre-oriented, which can be fun in its own way but does limit me.

I’m uploading today’s mix to mixcloud, where the timestamps can guide you as to what you’re hearing at any given point. I’ve intentionally started with something challenging and strange, to show that while I’m here to share new things, I do not plan on appealing to a lowest-common-denominator. I’d rather have courageous freaks in my orbit than people looking for the next trend. On occasion we all accidentally align with trends and that’s great, but I want my work as a curator and creative mind to remain entirely self-guided and independent of others. It is so easy to get caught up in the fear of “what if I’m doing something that isn’t cool,” but that often leads to a sort of self-censorship and homogeny that I find depressing. You can find my mix near the very end of this post. It’s about 80 minutes long and you can decide what value it holds for yourself. I think I did a decent job. I do care about your feedback, naturally, I just don’t plan on letting it steer me in directions I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. First up, though, here’s the last third or so of my interview with Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe from the band Thank, in which we discuss our shared love of outsider experimentalists Xiu Xiu.

Xiu Xiu

Trauma Angel: So we’re going to discuss one of your favorite bands, Xiu Xiu. Is it because they wrote a song for you? [2010’s Dear God, I Hate Myself contains a song called “This Too Shall Pass Away (For Freddy)”]

Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe: No, but, also when I was first getting into them, the first time I heard that song it did feel quite serendipitous. I was just playing random songs of theirs that the algorithm was showing me and there it was just in parentheses, “For Freddy.” I felt seen. I wouldn’t say that was the reason, but that definitely helped during the kind of early stages of me being into that band. That probably did accelerate the attachment to some extent.

And when did you first hear them? How old were you? Do you recall what year it was?

It was quite late, honestly. I think that the first thing of theirs I heard was, it would’ve been 2017, was for the A.V. Club’s “A.V. Undercover,” they did that cover of “Sharp Dressed Man” by ZZ Top. I thought that was really cool. For some reason I felt quite intimidated getting into them beyond that, but around that time they released Forget. I think it took me a while before I gave it a proper go. For some reason it felt like a large undertaking to get into them properly. So maybe four or five months after hearing the cover I listened to that album. I was initially quite disappointed, because the first song on that album has a guest vocalist doing the shouty, almost rapping thing. That was the first original song of theirs I heard and I was initially really disappointed that person wasn’t on more. I wanted more of that.

So you had to get over your initial disappointment but found your way in anyway?

Yeah like I knew Jamie Stewart was the lead vocalist, but I was hoping there’d be more of that. Maybe like some kind of back and forth, like a Chester Bennington & Mike Shinoda styled dynamic. It didn’t seem outside the realms of possibility!

Xiu Xiu strikes me as very deliberate music, but I think a lot of that deliberate nature involves seeing how much they can get away with and antagonize the audience without losing them.

Sure. This is something I’ve thought about a lot. It was very short-lived, but during peak Covid I started a blog and one of the blog posts was about exactly that. About how the appeal of Xiu Xiu, a lot of the time, is that they’re just kind of infuriating and they almost never do exactly what you want them to do. But that in itself is quite compelling. They almost do what you want them to do, but there’ll be some confusing or frustrating choice they’ve made but that’s kind of what makes me keep wanting to come back to it.

I get that. I always feel like they’re a band who have a catalog that veers wildly from one album to the next, as if they’re reacting in opposition to what they’ve just done. Like going from Ignore Grief to their new record, you’re going from this intentionally obscured and harsh release to something quite accessible.

Right. Every Xiu Xiu album has merit and its enjoyable qualities to me, but some hit closer than others and Ignore Grief was challenging for me. To me, it was leaning a bit too hard into the antagonistic nature.

I also wrote that the new album is “more accessible” but then I listened back and really thought to myself, is this even readily accessible music or am I just accustomed to listening to Xiu Xiu? It’s catchy, but there’s still a lot of nasty elements at play.

I think it’s a bit of both. Like I’m sure you’ve seen some of the press about it, where they mentioned writing a psych rock record initially.

I actually try not to read press on things I’m going to write about or review until I’ve formed most of my ideas because I worry it’ll alter my own impressions. Like I’ve read interviews and small snippets online pertaining to your new record so that I don’t repeat questions or trip over my own words, but I’m not reading reviews of it yet. So I haven’t read the press on the new Xiu Xiu yet and don’t know what the angle is.

I think that’s cool. Can I share with you a couple of things about it then?

Yeah! Now I’ve already written my bit about it so we’re good.

So what I’ve gleaned from the press surrounding it is that they were initially trying to write it like a psych rock record and then Jamie remembered that they hate psych rock. I think their new drummer is a psych rock guy and Jamie was inspired by that and thought they’d try to write that and got halfway through writing it but chose not to fully dive into that. But you can hear it.

Yeah, I hear that in the pacing and guitar of “TDFTW” right away.

It’s that and then they reference the quote from Blixa Bargeld when he quit The Bad Seeds where he said “I didn’t join a rock and roll band to play rock and roll.”

Oh I love Blixa so much. He’s a constructive antagonist.

I have to admit I don’t know his body of work so well, but I have to say his words are coming from a place of wry knowingness rather than just being an asshole.

I enjoy [Bargeld’s long-running project] Einsturzende Neubauten thoroughly and they’re one of my platonic ideals of what industrial music should be. Much like punk rock, I feel it’s a genre and aesthetic rooted in reshaping a changing world for the better. I didn’t know about that quote or how it touched on Xiu Xiu there but I like that. How many times have you seen Xiu Xiu? I know you saw them last week.

Yeah, I saw them last Friday. I’ve seen Xiu Xiu twice and Jamie Stewart solo once, and that was interesting because they were touring their solo record but the set was almost all Xiu Xiu songs. I guess it’s more of that antagonizing people’s expectations, so in a way it feels I’ve seen Xiu Xiu three times. They’re an interesting live band because I feel that they are my favorite band, but like, I would find it difficult to recommend to someone who wasn’t a superfan that they should go see them live because it is such a challenging show. So the most recent time I saw them last week, they had such a long gap between every song and didn’t say anything. It was just these long pauses of silence between every song. It became clear that it was intentional. I think actually that maybe the previous time I saw them it had been the same, but that time they had an ongoing disagreement with the sound engineer so I assumed that the weird pacing and weird vibe was like because of the hostility between them and the engineer. Now, having seen them again, where things went according to plan, I think that’s just what they do. It took me a while to get on board with it, and then I came to thinking it was cool. But I think that’d be really offputting for someone who’s a casual fan, and I guess that’s how they like it.

I saw them once fourteen years ago.

Was that for Dear God, I Hate Myself?

It was. Had a lot of fun. Awful lineup where they played with this terrible band called The Growlers who were like sleepy indie rock. It wasn’t fun being out at the show but seeing Xiu Xiu after it was great and cathartic. I first heard the song “Ian Curtis Wishlist” when I was maybe twenty and I remember thinking music shouldn’t sound like this because I wasn’t familiar with any of the musical traditions they were drawing from at that point.

Although I’m sad that I didn’t get into them until 2017, I actually think it’s probably quite good in some ways because prior to that I don’t know if I would’ve been as open to such melodramatic music. I can remember Kelly (who plays in Solderer with me and who used to be in Beige Palace), introduced me to Extra Life around when Beige Palace was first a band and initially I could not get into it at all because I found it so over the top and so grating. That would’ve been maybe 2015. I couldn’t get into it at all. Then another two years after that I kinda got into Xiu Xiu and for whatever reason didn’t have that same resistance and retroactively I was able to understand Extra Life. I think the only reason I was able to get into Xiu Xiu even at the time was because the first half of 2018 was one of the worst periods of mental health I’ve had in my life. I sort of got into them at the end of 2017 as a casual fan and then hit this slump for the first three months of 2018. I was basically just listening to them non-stop. Now it’s irreversible and I am just a Xiu Xiu superfan for better or worse, but maybe the reason I connected then was that I was having such a shit time. I was more susceptible to such melodramatic music.

For me, being 21 when I got into them was very pivotal. It was very much a place I was.

I was 24 at the time, so not far off.

It was mostly Fabulous Muscles for me at that point and it tapped into so much of where I was. I think if you were to play something like that for me for the first time now I’d have a harder time gauging the sincerity of it, but at that point I had no filter for it I was just happy to have it without context.

I feel I maybe had almost the opposite experience. I was so irony-poisoned as a teenager that it took me until my mid-twenties to engage with that much music that’s so sincere. I feel basically until I was 24 I couldn’t engage with anything so sincerely emotional. Not that I only listened to music that was ironic but I had to have a certain amount of emotional attachment and I had to work on trying to be more of a sincere person. I’d like to think that in the last seven years I’ve succeeded in that but I think I had almost the opposite path into this thing where I couldn’t engage with anything that felt that sincere.

I still love it but it’s harder for me to find the sincerity in things now. Maybe I’m getting away from myself after hearing too much music. I’m not one to decide what authentic emotion is or isn’t but there’s still that part of me that questions in a way I didn’t when I was younger. So you wouldn’t advise someone to go to a Xiu Xiu show, but if you wanted to get someone into Xiu Xiu, where would you start them? A song, a playlist, an album?

I started with Forget and I do think that’s a good starting point, but I think I’d recommend Always and then, depending on which aspects they liked, I’d maybe suggest either Dear God, I Hate Myself, Forget, or Fabulous Muscles, depending on which aspects of it they felt they most connected with. For me, I think, sometimes I’d say Always is my favorite and sometimes I wouldn’t. I think it’s the album where they do the best version of each thing that they do. All the things they do are on that record and are done well, I think.

It’s a high water mark for me as well. There’s the songwriting you could carve a pop hit from, but there’s also that noisy shit that makes itself endearingly distanced from such pop crossover success.

Is Always the first one with Angela as well?

I think she’s on Dear God as well?

I like the whole discography, but I think at the point where she joined is when they really leveled up as a band. I think that run of albums from Dear God through Forget is just untouchable. What a crazy run of albums.

Until that point it seemed they were more of a shifting band. Angela joining turned it from Jamie & friends into more of a core creative grouping.

I think it’s useful to have a foil.

Where does your appreciation for Xiu Xiu lead you? What is its impact in your own art? I would not say Thank sounds like Xiu Xiu although I can see you playing similar bills and that you have a kindred nature.

So, I think quite often, when I’m writing a song I will have a particular song or album or artist in mind. I’ll know, on some level, that whatever I do isn’t going to sound like that, but I’ll have it in mind. I kind of feel like Xiu Xiu is a band that I’ve almost never felt comfortable doing that with. There hasn’t really been one where I’m like, “oh I’m going to try to write something that sounds like ‘Get Up’ or ‘Smear the Queen.’” But yeah, they’re kinda untouchable. It’s like I couldn’t even begin to try and imitate them. Jamie’s style of lyric writing didn’t necessarily directly influence me, but made me feel more comfortable and confident in the way that I was writing for Thank.

I’ve talked about this before in a couple interviews that when we wrote our first EP I was very self-conscious and felt that I was being too raw and direct. I feared I was giving too much away. Ultimately what I’ve realized anyway is that, unless you are me and know what I’m talking about, it’s really not that clear. The first Thank EP was the most raw and direct lyrics I’d written. It felt like I was getting away from me and I thought “oh god is this okay?” So it was in the interim between that EP and the second that I got into Xiu Xiu. I’m not going to suggest that it changed the way I write lyrics, but it made me feel much more self assured that it’s cool and you can be that direct. Particularly on some of the earlier Xiu Xiu stuff, Jamie’s very direct, way more than I could ever be. It made me feel more comfortable with that.

I also think their sound changes so much, but it still always sounds like Xiu Xiu and it made me less concerned about whether or not something “sounds like” Thank. We used to have more of a fixed idea in mind about what Thank should be or does sound like, but I’ve learned as long as it’s that group of people playing the songs then it’s gonna sound like you. They’re such an odd band that it’s hard to pull direct influence from Xiu Xiu where it’s like what would you even take from it. But where they have influenced me and us has been in reaffirming that it’s okay to write lyrics that are raw and direct. It’s okay to write stuff that’s quite far removed from what you do, because it’ll still sound like you because it is you. That’s the influence I guess. It’s the confidence to do things.

That may be even more important than a stylistic cue. I don’t think you’re going to start singing like Jamie.

I don’t think it’d suit me, but you never know. Maybe on album three.

Trauma Angel Radio

I’ve been wrangling with the embed code for a while on this and can’t quite tell how it’ll work or if it will, so please click on the image below for a direct link to the Mixcloud radio program. I’ve got songs for you from the past, the immediate present, and some periods in-between, spanning black metal, noise, post-punk, shoe-gaze, dungeon synth, and more. I hope you’ll enjoy the flow and pacing of this mix, but I’m also eager to receive your thoughts. The goal is always to balance the familiar with new and challenging depths, letting the musical discovery process become more organic like the radio used to be and less of a dedicated immersion in “all new” or “all nostalgic” listening. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Future editions of this paid newsletter may contain more than just an interview blurb and radio, but I wanted to keep this simple and direct to avoid burning myself or my audience out. Please enjoy. Tracklist below:

Nurse With Wound- “The Golden Age of Telekinesis”
The Cure- “Warsong”
Sadness Saturn- “Dreamer”
Boarhammer- “Tree Transvection”
Ordeal by Roses- “City of Forms I: Hostile Architecture”
Putrid Marsh- “Shattered Stone Edifice”
Whispering Sons- “Poor Girl”
Yellow Eyes- “Winter is Looking”
Dreamcrusher- “Antifa Baker”
Iami- “Orvalho do Crepusculo”
Duma- “Sin Nature”
Belong- “Perfect Life”
Brainiac- “Collide”