I'm all for confrontational absurdism as a means of personal exploration in experimental rock- Xiu Xiu has been doing it successfully since Brent DiCrescenzo got his last piece of Kinsella brother flame mail. That's some biting commentary, all right. In fact, Dick Cheney is invoked only once, on "The Title Track of This Album", when members of the band blankly repeat the phrase, "Joan of Arc, Dick Cheney, Mark Twain," over electronic noise from a drill. The rest of the album follows suit- hints of Kinsella's criticism of the reigning machine are buried within awkward stabs at soul-searching and meandering character studies. Yes, Tim Kinsella just turned a potential indictment of Bush's "crusade" into a personal statement of his existential crisis. "If D.C.'s streets make a neat pentagram and every dollar bill brags God's behind our plan/ Who am I to have any idea who I am?"
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