Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing: Songs of Sodomy and the Compost of Aethyr (Muzai)

For reasons we can't and won't fully explain, Elsewhere has always found something of considerable interest in the archly arty, post-punk/experimentalism and enjoyably indulgent shadowland intelligence of GPOGP which sometimes almost gets close to bleak pop of the Fall/Toy Love/Tall Dwarfs/Pere Ubu kind.

Almost.

This “double album” – 16 songs which apparently can come in a limited edition wooden box with hand painted tarot cards – started with an odd premise: that each track would be a game of two halves; one half recorded live, the other back in the band's rehearsal room.

GPOGP live in the world of the esoteric, annoyed and outsider culture and it seems likely dinner table conversations include discussions of Madame Blavatsky, Odilon Redon, Vincent Price, B-grade movies and obscure No Wave bands from the Eighties . .. as well as various tarot interpretations.

This sprawling collection, which we might rightly call epic in its brooding grandeur, involved many and various local and international members of the shape-shifting group . . . but in the absence of any hard information (we are working from a typically anonymous download) we can't tell you who they might be.

Some might cruelly suggest their mothers might not want them named anyway.

But GPOGP have walked this unusual path previously – although sometimes with a less chiaroscuro intent – and although there's still something of an art school project gone deliberately wrong about what they do, we here at Elsewhere remain loyal to their odd vision . . . especially when they bang their ideas into the shape of something approximating what we might call songs from the midpoint of the first album onward (starting with the percussive Ixcuina and the genuinely widescreen art noise/scream pop of Out of Zone which is pure '84/post-Joy Division).

With samples from soundtracks (we recognise the hilarious one which opens the declamatory Dysentery Evangelism, from one of those Fifties US high school health films perhaps) and abrasive Crass-like post-rock, GPOGP remain firmly on a tangent of their own.

In the mid Eighties this kind of approach wasn't unfamiliar -- think Jed Town/ICU in New Zealand -- but in these wilfully careerist days it seems like aberrant behaviour.

In that regard, more power to them . . . but this is certainly not for everyone, and perhaps even for almost no one.

For reviews of previous GPOGP albums at Elsewhere see here.