Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing-Eeling LP (2013)

This band has the worst name I've heard yet, in going on two years' worth of music blogging. It just sounds awkward: two gerunds in one band name? That's a little much. I'm not a nominalist, though, so heroic music critic (ha!) that I am, I'm willing to give everyone a fair spin before I change the soundtrack to Nino Rota.

Girls Pissing on Girls builds up impressionistic portraits of decrepit living, occasional outbursts of nightmarish action, and a barely-perceptible but pulsing rage beneath the static gloom. There's no forward momentum to these songs. They lumber along in an autistic sleep-walking nullnode procession, like someone who took too much Ambien and is stumbling around the hallways of their apartment at 5 am with the lights off.

The band is adept at sucking the listener into these freakish soundscapes, forcing one to keep listening even though the lumbering tension and lack of cathartic release winds you up something terrible. At the center of GPOGP (see? The name doesn't even make for a good acronym!)'s sound is the undynamic tension between the synthesizer and drumming: the synth is the canvas for the noisescapes sketched out by the rhythm(less) section and the harsh, flat intonations of the dual female-male vocalists. Best tune: "The Dance of Salome," which manages to maintain the eerie ambience of the previous few songs while making it almost warm. Fans of Swans will dig this; the LP also reminds me of Broken Water's majestically flawed Seaside and Semikrasky ropera.

Check out Eeling over at Tenzenmen Records. Then pick up a copy of it from the same peeps.