Xiu Xiu

Tonight at 7 p.m.

At the Blind Pig

$12 cover, all ages

Somewhere outside of Montreal, a man is sitting on a bus, lazily talking on the phone. He casually riffs about his friends, his plans for the not-so-distant future and an obscure 1998 Chinese film about a teenage prostitute. While this might sound like the makings for some sort of surreal, independent film, it's nothing out of the ordinary for Jamie Stewart, mastermind and soft-spoken frontman of the indie troupe Xiu Xiu.

"We just say 'shoe shoe.' That's how we pronounce it, but it's not an English word. And in different dialects it's probably pronounced differently," Stewart said oft the oft-debated pronunciation of the Californian trio.

Asked how they came to use the name, Stewart referred to the aforementioned film: "There were parallels between the main character of the movie's life and the decisions she was making, and my life. Not specific things, but just sort of the way she was dealing with the problems in her life."

Stewart and his fellow bandmates Ches Smith and Caralee McElroy are landing at The Blind Pig tonight - and the amount of times he's answered the above questions is palpable in his nonchalance toward them.

"It's unfortunate that most tours aren't that interesting," he said. "It's cool to play every night but basically, we play, sleep and play again. The interesting part is playing."

Understanding the history behind the group's name makes it easy to presume the sort of topics they approach on their albums - primarily the deep-seeded ugliness they find in the world around them.

"It's just about real things that are going on in our lives and our families," Stewart said of their first full-legnth, The Air Force. "It's just real, and not in a metaphorical sense, I mean literally real."

With such vitriolic topics, Xiu Xiu has found a few detractors, but he said the band just wants to mae music that's important to it. Tonight at The Blind Pig, you can decide for yourself.