Jamie Stewart

I already wrote this a few years ago about “Girl With Basket Of Fruit”: Jamie Stewart, leader of Xiu Xiu, is a modern, sprawling version of “Frankie Teardrop”. His output is neither reassuring nor comforting: it's often brutal and destabilizing in its impact. If on record his music is a lacerating journey made of emotional and sonic ups and downs, centered on themes that are often shocking and extreme, live this show will spare you none of it — if anything, less so.

The chance to see him on stage comes at the final date of Unplugged in Monti, this time in the Conference Hall of the unusual venue Industrie Fluviali. A space that's about to welcome a small, attentive and engaged audience for Stewart's solo performance. Shortly after 9pm, Jamie strides quickly onto the stage. He takes off his jacket and mask and picks up his black Gibson, which he'll never put down. A few white lights trained on him, the paintings and drawings of the room all around, Stewart greets and shyly thanks the crowd. Then the performance begins.

Between songs he doesn't say a word, focused on the feverish execution of the tracks. Stewart becomes one with his guitar, whether it's a gentle, slow arpeggio or an angry, relentless strumming. He manages to shift the songs from a register so faint and muffled it seems about to shatter into a thousand pieces, to a furious, powerful tone. He opens with one of my favorite tracks from the Xiu Xiu catalog, “Botánica De Los Angeles”, taken from “Angel Guts: Red Classroom” from 2014: no more synthesizers or electronic beats, just the words, even rawer and more powerful in their bare-bones execution.

If many compositions were already essential and stripped-down on record, this new lean form proves just as interesting for other, more produced tracks. Stewart recites and interprets the various registers of the songs, drawn from his vast repertoire. The pieces performed thus span both his earliest records and his most recent ones. There's “I Broke Up”, taken from the debut “Knife Play”, a poignant “Sad Redux-O-Grapher” and “Sad Pony Guerilla Girl” from the follow-up “A Promise” (2003), “Fabulous Muscles”, right up to the recent “A Bottle Of Rum”, as well as a few gems fished out from the cornerstones of his output, like “The Oldness“.

And it's right at the end, with the performance of a stunning “Girl With Basket Of Fruit”, accompanied by a small gong and a whistle, that Stewart brings the concert to its peak. Eleven songs, just over an hour of music of rare power and intensity, closed out by “Just As I Am”. Then, as quickly as he'd appeared, Jamie Stewart basks in the band's final burst of applause as he slips away.

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