Eeling
by Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing

Listening to the new Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing album, Eeling, feels like wandering through a damp and mouldering mansion rattled by dank sea winds, with a new wonder to behold in each of its rooms: in one, an embittered couple destroy each other over the years; in another, a dissipated priest lies on dusty bedclothes. Or is it like travelling through a damned country – first a desolate post-industrial cityscape, then a small town ravaged by the occult?

It’s hard not to get carried away by the visual nature of the album, particularly as it comes in a highly visual format – as a download code in the back of a rather fun little booklet. These are available from the website of the band’s label, Muzai Records, and the booklet is really a star in its own right. A collaborative effort from artists and band members past and present, it’s an ingenious collage of both found and original art, featuring such recurring motifs as birds, naked ladies, fish, eels, squid – all in varying states of birth, life and death - and Christian and occult symbolism.

The tracks themselves add up to a gloriously nightmarish romp through all that’s foul and abject. Particular standouts include claustrophobic historical thriller ‘15th Century’, ‘Fingers down the Throat of Love’, a Rosemary’s Baby-style fertility hymn, and ‘Eight of Cups’, which has Steven Huf’s performance on horns giving it a flavour that is not only funereal (as on other tracks), but also strangely nautical, bringing to mind an abandoned port town complete with phantom foghorns.

Honourable mentions also go to ‘The Dance of Salome’ a lovely, ethereal dirge which provides some respite from more industrial, post-punk tracks, while ‘Nine of Swords’, perhaps the most rhythmically traditional track on the whole album, has the distinction of a jarring new music video featuring vintage footage of cheek-chewing British ravers.

With complex, symphonic arrangements, jangly guitars and a harmony or two, the clever lyrics unfold against a backdrop of mournful horns a baroque catalogue of woe, underscored at times with a wry humour in such context-less lyrics as “Swastika window paint”. The raw, untreated vocals and aggressively undisguised Kiwi accents bring inevitably to mind such dark local classics as The Mutton Birds’ ‘The Heater’ and Tall Dwarfs’ ‘Slide’, mulched in with The Cure’s Pornography album and a sprinkling of Tool. If it sounds like I’m struggling to describe GPOGP’s sound, I am. With its post-punk, industrial and folk leanings combining to make something totally unique, this is an album that leaves you with your jaw on the floor.