Pitchfork

XXL's debut album, Ciautistico!, was a satisfying yet piecemeal affair, born of a transcontinental infatuation between Jamie Stewart of American shock-poppers Xiu Xiu and Italian post-rockers Larsen. While it was admirably cohesive for an impulsive collaboration, it didn't achieve a complete synthesis of aesthetics-- the elongated, coruscating drones sounded like pure Larsen, while the eruptive shards of dissonance and electro workouts were pure Stewart.

The even more ponderously titled ¿Spicchiology? doesn't feel radically different than Ciautistico!, but it does feel more developed, and winds up leaving a stronger impression in the bargain. This time, Stewart brought his Xiu Xiu partner Caralee McElroy along on his Italian adventure, with counterintuitive results. Rather than sounding more like Xiu Xiu than Ciautistico!, the influence is less apparent: Vocals are sparse, and splattery electro-pop seldom interrupts the album's slow, shadowy undulation. The perkier side of XXL has been severely quashed here, leaving a vast armature of obsidian sound in its place. If it favors either band's style, it's Larsen's diaphanous post-rock. But it's really a full-bodied amalgamation, Xiu Xiu's nightmarish austerity infiltrating every corner of their collaborators' usual varicolored washes.

But let's zero in on that "vast armature," because it is the most immediate and evocative impression the album conveys, and it couldn't have happened if it weren't so formally harmonized. There's nothing metaphorical about discussing music and architecture in similar terms, as the same transaction-- the imposition of the human will on space (one conceptual, one physical)-- undergirds both. Despite the disparity of the media, we think about music and buildings in similar terms of structure, volume, harmony, and style (where functionality dissolves into pure aesthetic form). So the intuitive leap between the dilapidated grandeur of ¿Spicchiology? and a moldering mansion is a small one.

Funerary ranks of Farfisa and electric viola stretch out like dank, drafty hallways, impossibly long, periodically sweeping up into great spiral staircases. Gongs and glockenspiels flicker from the dimness like recessed sconces. These gloomy passages are shot through with a gilt scrollwork of metallurgical electronics and decorative banjo. Distorted protuberances jut from the corners like stone gargoyles. All the while, shimmering pianos, guitars, and synthesizers filter weakly through the overriding roar, like late-day light through lace curtains. Stewart and McElroy wander these endless halls, occasionally bursting into abstracted song that puts oblique words to the abiding tristezza embodied in the music.

And like the manor it sketches out, the album contains a multiplicity of detail within the tumbledown order of its form. The fat, rubbery tones of "So Easy, So Cheap" are sunk in a morass of monkish harmonies that shrill out infernally, and the tense creepshow organ that organizes "Daydrinking" is flecked with broken glass. The crystalline arrangements of "The Green Count Tapes" and "...Nothing About Dwarves?" are wracked by hordes of malevolent machines. Stewart spends most of his scant vocal time in the aching, syrupy mode familiar from Xiu Xiu songs like "Fabulous Muscles (Mama Black Widow Version)", as on the slow-burning weeper "Little Mouse of the Favelas" or the sidewinding electro-pop of "King of Koalas", which threatens to disrupt the album's mesmerizing thrall. But it quickly settles back into its dark groove, climaxing with epic closer "The Tale of Brother Cakes and Sugar Dust"-- an archetypal version of post-rock's slo-mo mushroom cloud on Godspeed's dwarfing scale.

For all of its majestic instrumentation and its gradual kneading of musical themes, it's tempting to regard ¿Spicchiology? as symphonic. But commanding structure and flutes alone do not a symphony make. Lacking a fuller range of emotional and mimetic expressivity, the album is closer to a series of fugues. As such, it has a sense of grinding persistence, orderly yet shifting, like the spectral houses so many of us wander in our dreams, with just as little discernible meaning.

Is "Spicchiology" a religion, as the pie chart printed on the CD, which measures it against "Other Religions" and "Non-Religious", suggests? Is the band's preoccupation with in-title punctuation conceptual, or is it a diabolical scheme to make bloggers surf through fifty windows to find their system's character map? Are the characters of the Green Count and the Brother Cakes, which are pictured as silverware-and-food sculptures on the album's package, significant, or red herrings? While ¿Spicchiology? is presented as a work in code, nothing about it suggests the code might have a solution. In XXL's house of tarot cards, interpretation fails, replaced by a simpler interface: You go up the stairs, and then you go down, catching whatever unseen gusts fall along the way.