Xiu Xiu doing Eraserhead at Elsewhere (blurry pic by my crappy cellphone)

Tinkling, angelic bells ushered in the most mournful rendition of the Lady in the Radiator’s ascension anthem, “In Heaven,” I’ve ever heard, like a warbling hymn sung at a gravesite scented with night-blooming jasmine. At the conclusion of Xiu Xiu’s live interpretation of Eraserhead’s minimalist whooshing score, performed last week at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere, Jamie Stewart’s voice wavered and threatened to crack. Rather than the warm embrace of the Lady in the Radiator’s hand-clutching, chipmunk-cheeked, blissful performance, a moment of relief and hopefulness within Jack Nance’s Henry’s trapped and alienated, psychosexual world, this version of “In Heaven” upped the desperation. The need to believe that in heaven, at least, everything is fine was palpable. Then, Stewart rose from their seat, where they had been next to their fellow suit-wearing Xiu Xiu bandmate Angela Seo for the better part of their 45-ish minute set, and quietly buttoned up their suit jacket. Approaching a tray of glass bottles, they hurtled them, one by one, into a mic’d-up garbage can with a bang and splinter, jarringly piercing the tranquility of the Lady in the Radiator’s song and sending glass shards flinging from the bin. Apparently unsatisfied with the level of destruction or audience torment, Stewart grabbed a metal pipe and jabbed it into the trash, producing jump-scare booms and grinding pulverization.

Talk about a smashing finale! If I weren’t already standing, I would have given it an ovation!

I hesitated before opening this essay by being a big mouth blabbing about the concert’s ending for others who have yet to see the band’s Eraserhead shows, which they’ll be performing at least through February. But I had this grand finale spoiled for me, too, thanks to a post on X, and still, expecting this crushing conclusion didn’t lessen the shattering shock. I begin with the end because “In Heaven” is probably the song I—and every other Eraserhead head in attendance—anticipated, an iconic song that has been reinterpreted by musicians as varied as Pixies, The Weeknd, who sadly only left the radiator hissing on the end of his 2025 album Hurry Up Tomorrow, and Hilary Woods. In fact, Xiu Xiu marks the second time I’ve seen the song performed live within a span of a month; the first being Zola Jesus’s operatic cover in her stunningly stripped-back solo piano tour in September. I get why. We’re all still mourning David L. More than being a fan favorite, “In Heaven” encapsulated Xiu Xiu’s approach to taking on Lynch and Alan Splet’s sparse, howling score, from balancing a reverent tribute to the film’s influential haunted soundscape (Would we have Perverts without Eraserhead?) to filtering it through the most fragile moments of Xiu Xiu’s musical catalogue as Stewart dialed their voice down to a shaking whimper to the confrontational, physical, audience-punishing explosive conclusion that actually altered and expanded my interpretation of Eraserhead.

“In Heaven” was also the closest thing to an actutal song in the evening of overwhelming ominous whooshes, static cling, jangling clanking, toots, squips and squicks, bips, rattling, clucking (yes, clucking), clown giggles, whizzes, fuzzes, buzzes, squeaks, cries, and whines, all performed, seated, in front of a giant screen on which the band projected a new corresponding disturbed piss-colored video. Rather than a traditional concert, Xiu Xiu’s Eraserhead show was closer to a live performance of a sound and video art piece. This was made apparent almost immediately as the duo entered the stage, leaving their recent third member, fierce former Devo drummer David Kendrick behind (though Seo made up for his absence by wailing on the drums at one point), and turned on an expansive drone loop that was so fizzy it made my skin tingle, like I, too, was flying through the galaxy filled with eraser space dust. I panicked and dug through my bag for my earplugs, or I just might have passed out from nervous system overload. I should have known; earplugs were on the guide to the concert helpfully provided by Angela, alongside (re)reading the Bible, Lynch on Lynch. 

Even with my muffed-up ears, Xiu Xiu’s Eraserhead performance was quite different from their other fanatical Twin Peaks tribute, which pretty faithfully follows Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic wisful score and Julee Cruise’s Roadhouse blues, only with an added dash of Xiu Xiu’s darker edge. In contrast, their Eraserhead wasn’t a one-to-one recreation of the score. In an interview with RetroFuturista, Stewart explained their approach as “imagining a version lasting five hours, extending far beyond its original hour-and-a-half duration and expanding its universe.” Gee, I wish this performance had been five hours! This expansion of the Eraserhead universe was felt most clearly in the corresponding video projection, which, thankfully, didn’t seek to either redo Eraserhead or attempt the “Lynchian,” like, well, everybody else nowadays. With its flashing imagery of Francis Bacon’s screaming pope, drawings and photographs including knives, blood-smeared faces, forests, people in gimp masks, chickens, menacing funhouse grins, gooning expressions, and exploding buildings, the film reminded me more of cinematic tormenter Ken Camp, best known for his death-by-boredom serial killer road flick Highway Hypnosis. Rather than that lost highway, Xiu Xiu’s video shared an aesthetic similarity with Camp’s short Shock Video, which lives up to its title by mashing together horrific imagery of children with facial deformities, more bloody faces, mutilations, and war crimes, along with flashing white screens. Shock Video was a viewing experience so physically hostile that when watching it at Anthology Film Archives, I thought I might actually have to leave, or throw up. Instead, I closed my eyes and hoped it would be over soon. Xiu Xiu’s video wasn’t quite that extreme, but it was a mesmeric combination of ominous violent threats, psychosexual deviance, and random fever dream-like imagery. This is not to say their video projection was completely divorced from Eraserhead. Take, for instance, the woman messily, seductively drinking milk, which references Henry’s affair with his smoldering-eyed neighbor in a bathtub of milk (the next-door neighbor disappearing and only leaving her dry, ratty wig is my favorite shot of the entire film. Pure camp ecstasy). Other, more abstract imagery echoes the movie too, ranging from the obvious, like the zigzag carpet in Henry’s lobby (which got repurposed for the Black Lodge’s floor pattern), to the more subtle, such as the sudsy sea foam, which was reminiscent of the frothy polenta-like ooze that pours from Henry’s skinless I-don’t-know-if-it-even-is-a-baby.

Xiu Xiu’s music also had many nods to the film buried within its brutal, windwhipped, industrial drones: train whistles, eeeeeeelectricity, vaudevillian organ boogies, elevator cranks, uncomfortable bodily slurps and squishes, and, even the field recordings of clucking chickens tied to Henry’s uncomfortable dinner with his girlfriend/soon-to-be wife Mary’s (Charlotte Stewart) parents who serve itsy-bitsy chickens that wave and ooze from their orifices rather than submit to a carving. In fact, there were more direct allusions to the movie than I recognized while at Elsewhere, which I only picked up on later when rewatching the film. In particular, Seo and Stewart’s repeated hollered outbursts came straight from Eraserhead’s succinct script. Seo’s wrenching screams of “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” directly mimicked Mary’s meltdown at her perpetually crying monster spawn, and Stewart’s “Ok, Paul,” derived from the almost slapstick scene at the eraser factory.

Still, there were equal parts Xiu Xiu and Lynch/Splet. First, upon relistening to Xiu Xiu’s feel-bad 2023 album Ignore Grief after the show, I realized that, too, could be considered an Eraserhead score tribute with its industrial clangor, portentous pull drones, universe-sucking black hole ambient abysses, and Blixa Bargeld-like cat screaming, the latter of which already sounds like the Eraserhead baby. Yet, even more than Xiu Xiu’s previous engagement with airy dread and clamorous cacophony, the most characteristic live Xiu Xiu element in the performance was the duo’s playful sonic discord made up of strange, unlikely instruments, tools, and objects, like tiny bike horns, slides and tubes, and gratingly squealing balloons, blown up, squeaked out, and blown up again. Weeeeeeeeeee! This was glorious aural agony, reminiscent of previous Xiu Xiu shows I’ve attended in which the band performed songs from their abrasive album Girl with Basket of Fruit. They also tread dangerously between menacing and downright cartoonish, gleefully stepping way over that boundary at points with a few scampering and giggling noises. All in all, the use of these objects made the show seem like a live performance of Foley art and a pretty furious and antagonistic one at that! Now, if you’re wondering how the audience took this stark, alienating, inaccessible crowd dis-pleaser, I was too! On the one hand, I watched as a gaggle of people stomped out. (What were they expecting?!). On the other hand, during a lull in the dissonance, a guy piped up to holler an enthusiastic, “FUCK YEAH!” which made the crowd laugh. So file it under “divisive,” I guess! It’s clear who I agree with.

In addition to being awed by the performance at Elsewhere—so much so that I forgave the small venue for having the longest, slowest-moving security line I’ve ever experienced outside of an arena, Xiu Xiu also made me look at Lynch’s almost 50-year-old film differently. The day after the concert, I revisited Eraserhead for the god knows what time—the second this year as I reached for Lynch’s unforgiving debut feature first after hearing of his death. I’ve previously been open about how, unlike the rest of Lynch’s cherished filmography, I’ve always struggled with Eraserhead. It’s not the minimalism or the incomprehensibility or the nightmare state or the bleakness; it’s the baby. Specifically, it’s the baby’s gurgling, smacking mouth noises, sick, pus-filled mouth, and measled face that disturb me on a primeval level. Chalk it up to some ingrained terror of parenthood, which was certainly Lynch’s intent. Every time I watch the movie, I increasingly appreciate it, but no viewing made me appreciate the film more than post-Xiu Xiu’s show. Their performance illuminated some underappreciated aspects of the film, from the humor buried in the gross sound effects to Henry Spencer’s rage, the latter of which brings me back to the flung and massacred glass bottle conclusion. For most of Eraserhead, Henry wanders around with a confused, limp, emasculated Buster Keaton look, stumbling in puddles, stammering at the dinner table, clutching a bag in the janky elevator, blinking at his baby. He’s a proto-Beau Is Afraid depiction of flop-sweat anxiety in the face of sex, family, and Philadelphia. Yet, before Xiu Xiu’s performance, I somehow never saw Henry’s buried anger. I’m not sure how I missed the rage, given the film does end in infanticide! (Not to mention Mary’s “shut-ups”). Maybe it’s because Henry looks as bewildered as we are by the act. Yet, bug-eyed bafflement or no, the rage is there, both in the film and Xiu Xiu’s triumphant performance of its score, emerging either in an explosion of gore or glass. Fuck yeah!