YMMV / Xiu Xiu

• Friendly Fandoms: With friends Parenthetical Girls and Swans. The latter also shared Thor Harris as a percussionist and Chris Pravdica as a live bassist.
• Narm: Given how emotive and over-the-top Jamie Stewart's vocal delivery tends to be, it's natural that they sometimes slip into this. Sometimes, as in songs like "I Broke Up", the effect is completely intentional.
• Narm Charm: Often it loops back around- when combined with vocals that sound like Stewart is being tortured to death while singing, the ridiculousness makes it even more disturbing.
• Nightmare Fuel: In spades. Whether it comes from the bizarre production, Stewart's manic vocals, the harrowing lyrics or some combination of the three, many of Xiu Xiu's songs are just plain unnerving.
  • "Black Drum Machine." "THERE MUST BE SOME THINGS FOR WHICH OUR GOD CANNOT BE ACCUSED."
  • The end of "Cynthia's Unisex." "I hate everyone but you... I hate everyone but you..."
  • "El Naco." "I SEE IT AND I HAVE NO RIGHT TO SEE IT... I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT IS..."
  • "I Luv Abortion" is about a friend of Jamie's who cut herself while she was a pregnant teenager (even mailing them the knife she used), due to massive doubting of her parenting abilities. "I look at my thighs and I see death, it's great, I love abortion..."
  • "The Silver Platter." "God made us and now he wants us to die..."
  • "Support Our Troops OH!" Stewart's spoken-word monologue is creepy enough, but the dissonant sound effects really push it over the edge.
  • "Mary Turner Mary Turner", a song describing the true story of the utterly horrific murder of a pregnant black woman by a white lynch mob in Georgia. The word "lynching" doesn't even begin to describe what happened to her.
• Refuge in Audacity: "Black dick! Black dick! Black dick! Black dick!"
• Signature Song: "I Luv the Valley OH!"
• Tear Jerker: A very large chunk of their back catalogue is made up of relentlessly depressing and/or unsettling songs about extremely personal and often bleak subject matter.
  • "Botanica de Los Angeles", which seems to be about Stewart witnessing the suicide of a sexual assault victim and being unable to do anything.
  • "Dangerous You Shouldn't Be Here", about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. "There is no way to light an altar for you, everything is too wet."
  • "Luber", apparently about a student of Jamie's with neglectful parents. The impassioned delivery just makes it even more devastating.
  • "Suha". "I hate my body / I hate the desert / I'm gonna hang myself / when will I be going home?"
  • "Blacks". "I have had enough of this life."
  • "Petite", a song about child prostitutes. The sheer despair on display is utterly haunting, and the video is almost entirely composed of headshots of underaged girls that Jamie found on Backpage.
  • "Faith, Torn Apart" is also extremely sobering, with the latter half of the song being a spoken word poem from the perspective of each of the girls in the "Petite" video.