Xu Xu Fang

Seven Days Now

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

So, I’ve been digging the Xu Xu sounds since I first heard them in (I think) early 2008. Or earlier. Listening to this music makes me feel like forever could have been a year ago, and a year ago could have happened before I was born, so who knows. I do know that I’ve written words about this music before, but somehow my words seem to fail at capturing exactly what happens to my head when the Xu Xu Fang pushes through it.

I shall try again.

This CD - or EP, holding 5 songs - starts out with the cover of "Fascination Street" that appeared on the Perfect As Cats tribute album. It moves soft and slow and heavy and dreamlike, capturing the mood of the Cure’s original version, but with more depth and shadow, holding the beauty of the groove instead of the push of the beat.

“Seven Days Now” starts off like some space age western, drifting off into an interplanetary sunset, with the vocals pushing like waves of light over the oceanic sounds beneath. There are still definite touches of that Brian Jonestown Dandy drawl, but with each song, each movement that this band takes, they find themselves closer to walking along a path that’s all theirs. There’s a trip-hopped underbeat that slips against the darker psych-gaze flow, keeping the songs rolling forward even when they seem to be floating, hovering above you. Like “Your Way” that falls both sparse and lush, tripping out with a Portishead melancholy that’s held solid within some kind of Slowdive subterranean dream.

Then there’s an airplane lift off, and Xu Xu Fang moves from out of the waters and into the air with “Underground”. Still holding those shadows, but almost as if the darkness is just a plaything, pushing ahead into some world above with a little Jesus & Mary Chain “Stoned & Dethroned” vibe, but mixing that with a kind of Pavement touched indie-rock mentality and turning the whole thing into what you would expect from the in-flight band on Transcendental Airways.

The plane lands, the band disembarks, and moves into a somber dirge that holds the promises of a better future locked within the trunk of the car that they drive away in. This EP is epic. It’s a storyline, a soundtrack, a movie filmed in sound. If you just listen to it, the songs, the spaces within the songs, you get some kind of mythical big city fairytale forming in your mind. While it ends on somewhat of an ominous note, it ends leaving you feeling that it’ll be ok. It’s a cliffhanger, and all will be revealed in the future. Another EP, another episode. Perhaps.

Perhaps we need to wait for the sequel, or maybe this particular story is over, and like life, while beautiful, it’s sometimes also sad.