i’m really excited whenever we get to talk about an artist like this who is very important but whose legacy is not fully sealed yet. we talk about Jamie Stewart’s nepo baby (sort of…) background and the bands before Xiu Xiu, as well as the full back story behind the cover of A Promise. we also speculate as to why the internet likes this album (which is neither of our favorites… but i do like!) so much.
i also make a case for the first three Xiu Xiu albums being as musically important as the first three Velvet Underground albums - a point i’ve made several times and i will absolutely die on this hill.
i also didn’t fully appreciate how menacing this song was until recently:
here’s an alternate version of the famous album cover from a re-issue which was a photo taken at the same time that i hadn’t seen until now.
OOO can I listen to a fucking podcast WE’LL SEE! this is one of my least fave xiu xiu albums but apistat commander is the best my dad’s gonna die song
I was at the ‘only show’ his father went to at the cactus club, I put it in quotes cuz his dad played in IBOPA for a bit, which was cute cuz his dad was so like, proud to be bossed around by jamie the band leader, and i remember the cactus club show being a big deal, like jamie stopped the show for a sec and introduced him. and his dad being totally weird and quiet but smiling, I had no idea what was going on with his dad’s mental health thoguh til after he took his life
anyway I should listen to the episode before talking about the obvious stuff
it is completely insane to me still to have like a huge number of the amount of bands I see because they were local and played at five dollar a pop teen centers become seminal Important music, like I became friends with deerhoof drummer when everyone told him I have tourettes too because I was sword fighting people with baguettes between acts at the fishbowl (I do not have tourettes, but this kinda convinced me for a few years, lol) . the fishbowl was a bakery six days of the week but on Sunday nights they’d have the best all ages shows in the south bay. it’s definitely where I saw the highest concentration of xiu xiu /xitsj next to the clothing store on 1st and the cactus club… ibopa was done by the time the fishbowl popped up
I remember getting into music after college (I did not have musically cool friends to turn me onto stuff, which is something that strikes me a little sadly whenever I listen to this podcast and hear about things like scenes or even the album project) and long before ever seriously approaching Xiu Xiu I listened to this record on the way to work and heard in Walnut House the lyric “…hurting my butt hole” while waiting for a light to turn from red to green on a bus as I was staring at a JiffyLube on the other side of the street.
Finally listening to this record now as an actual fan and it’s really good.
I’m listening to the Sufjan episode right now and your impression of his singing voice is startlingly accurate! I did a double-take, lol.
Great episode! I loved Illinois back in the day but I could never get into Michigan, so as I’m listening I’m feeling like im halfway between your and Max’s energy. Fun place to be.
Max was much less impressed with my Jamie Stewart impression on the Xiu Xiu episode. lmao.
also yeah we could cover The Polyphonic Spree at some point given how much they fit the indie kitsch theme of Kitschfork. i guess we’d have to figure out what album to cover.
that’s right, this podcast isn’t dead after all. me and Max talk about Animal Collective’s 2000 (sort of) debut album Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished which we’ve both always loved and also features some surprisingly creepy/unsettling lyrics.
this was one of my favorite episodes we recorded back in 2023, and i’m glad it’s finally come to light. there’s also more coming in the future.
also enormous thanks to @spacetown for editing this episode and motivating me to get back into trying to do this podcast!!
The Balitmore City Paper (RIP) article on Animal Collective from 2005 that i used as a source for this episode is a pretty fun read btw, and features some illustrations i used in the background art for the website:
also i can’t get over how the album art of one of the versions of this album (i think the CD release that was packaged with Danse Manatee) looks like the pointing soyjack meme
we talked about it at the end of the most recent episode, but it is highly likely Max and I going to come back for an episode about Fog so i’ve been thinking about the guy’s music again
most interesting somewhat forgotten 2000’s indie guy? he started as a hip-hop DJ and he also flirted with ambient, indie folk, electronica, and being in some sort of rock band. because of this none of his albums really sound the same (and i still don’t know what the fuck he was doing with his album Ditherer, even though the below song from it is good) he struggled to really get traction and seemed to quit trying to be an indie guy and mostly does other things (like production work) now.
other than his album Ether Teeth, his other most well known thing is being on the Hymie’s Basement album with Yoni Wolf from Why?
i still think about “21st Century Pop Song” a lot. one of my favorite pieces of Bush-era culture
just found Ether Teeth back in April and it completely carried me through that month… one of my new favorite things honestly. wallpaper sink or swim and no boys allowed are particularly memorable. i think the ‘hip hop The Microphones’ take is pretty prevalent but i think there’s a really good comparison to The Books there too. if my experience is anything to go off of it seems most people just find Fog these days digging into the backlog of hymies basement or clouddead
i fully recommend 10th Avenue Freakout as well, that one seems to be ignored a lot. there is more like traditional songy indie electrionica pop type stuff going on and less of the warbly ambient hip hop but the songs are more consistently developed and arc of the album is still really good. still don’t quite know what the fuck he was going for on Ditherer though
i forgot to post our more recent episodes, but the newest one is out. it’s on Blueberry Boat by the Fiery Furnaces - definitely an artist and album that me and Max were very much looking forward to covering. spoilers: we rank it highly
this album is of course partially famous for getting a 9.6 on Pitchfork and causing a lot of division in the indie music nerd community of 2004. much intrigue and drama ensued! but what they don’t tell you is the original review on Pitchfork was actually pretty good, particularly this last section we reference in the episode:
maybe i just appreciate the dig at The Strokes in there though: the avatars of deeply mid millennial music.
there are also some interview clips from around the time of Bitter Tea online that were at least a little bit enlightening. i think one of these is where Eleanor calls Matt “a manipulator… but in a good way!” which is the ultimate backhanded compliment
speaking of Matthew being obnoxious, here’s more about his infamous weird rant about Radiohead we mentioned on the podcast:
i fully recommend Bitter Tea and Widow City to anyone who wants to check out further Fiery Furnaces - i think they consistently released good albums and the press’s more muted response to them was more a result of them not knowing how to handle their prolificness + Matthew being kind of obnoxious.
anyway definitely one of the important artists of the 00’s that i hope get more of the retrospective attention and praise that they deserve to have.
also i forgot to mention that we put out this Fog episode awhile back! that was our first back in forever so there’s also a discussion in the beginning about Pitchfork layoffs and Steve Albini’s death
there’s also a bonus episode i recorded with @toups back in June, which i handed to @spacetown to edit and will come out whenever he actually has free time to get to it lol.
yeah i like that album too! only got into it pretty recently tho have yet to fully dive in. it was one thing i avoided for a long time because of the negative review on Pitchfork and there being a lot of backlash to it at the time. but it turns out… it’s just another good Fiery Furnaces album.
also we didn’t mention this on the episode because it was recorded before then, but there’s a new Fiery Furnaces live album that came out this month!
I’ve been waiting for this episode, and it was worth it. The Fiery Furnaces I feel are a really underappreciated band, and I really love Eleanor’s solo albums. Blueberry Boat was such a seminal album, I loved its ambition, the song shifts, and in a personal context that album was very important to me. It came out when I started really getting into music, and had also just moved for the first time, and that album and Madvillainy defined that period for me (2004), where I would play them over and over again, imprinted in my memory.
My favorite Fiery Furnaces song though has to be Benton Harbor Blues from Bitter Tea, it has such a beautiful melancholic quality, that I think its music video perfectly captures.
I was wondering about this lol. I kind of assumed I blew it and it was unusable but I hope he doesn’t have too hard of a time editing out all the unnecessary shit-talking on my part.
