Xiu Xiu's lead singer Jamie Stewart knows a thing or two about pain, heartache, and misery; one certainly assumes so from listening to his plaintive wailings on the band's latest record, La Forêt. The Oakland/Seattle-based experimental noise trio remain characteristically uncharacterizable, save for Stewart's verge-of-shattering crystalline voice. It's an album that takes several plays before any of the dozen esoteric, despondent tracks are even remotely comprehensible, but on our first pass we did a... more ›