Album Review

Broken Bells’ self-titled debut arrives with much fanfare—it is the collaboration between producer and multi-instrumentalist Danger Mouse and the Shins’ frontman James Mercer. Though the pair settles for a quiet, almost complacent mediation between their two styles, they’ve produced a cohesive album heavily influenced by psychedelia and acid rock.

 I was a total sucker for jj’s debut offering, nº 2. Part of the appeal was the aesthetic—an embodiment of what LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy called “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s”—a more faithful approximation of that decade’s music than anything Alan Palomo has ever written. More importantly, the melodies were pretty much undeniable. And while much was made of jj’s particularly smoked-out brand of dream-pop, it was those melodies that made nº 2 one of the best records of 2009.

Dear God, I Hate Myself is not an album for everyone. Xiu Xiu seems almost deliberately alienating, making music that is disquieting and claustrophobic. The lyrics wander awkwardly from the nonsensical to the perverse. The angst-filled title polarizes, yet the album represents an entire spectrum of emotions, from joy to dark introspection. Sometimes, this results in an incomprehensible and confusing work. But at other moments, Dear God, I Hate Myself delights with tongue-in-cheek humor and unabashed, unbridled innovation.