But then later I saw pictures from their tour polaroid book and it changed my mind a little. It contained pictures of Jamie Stewart squatting over a telephone and frowning, someone pissing on their own feet and Jamie again doing some weird pose with ass sticking out. So, I realised, maybe there was a funny side I was missing. The pictures didn't really go with the description of the band I gave in the first paragraph. What was the deal?

Though often feigning an air of extreme importance, Xiu Xiu seem to always keep their tongue in their cheek. In light of this, the dark, sexual, and incestuous lyrics take a new form as black humour, the strange Smiths reference ("Kurt Stumbaugh, I can feel the soil falling over my head") becomes funnier and the pedestal they seemed to previously demand becomes an in-joke.

The most striking impression which I had of Xiu Xiu was that their releases seemed to be aimed to be enjoyed not as individual songs but as pieces on their own. For the large part I listened to them that way, although 'I Luv the Valley' and some others did have their own place as awesome stand alone songs.

So with 'Women as Lovers' I expected more of the same. And it mostly seems to work that way with one notable exception, which sticks out even when you've only seen the tracklist. That exception is the cover of Queen's 'Under Pressure'. The straight up classic rock nature of the song I expected them to do away with isn't shunned in the slightest. However, I don't think it's a bad thing. Yes, it kills the album's flow and doesn't fit at all but I think taking that too seriously misses the point. It seems much more of a defiance of expectations, to me, than a perfectly fitting cover. It seems like they knew it didn't fit.

Forget 'Under Pressure' though, because it doesn't really bear any relation to the rest of the album. The rest is, though it sounds fairly crude, Xiu Xiu as usual. There are acoustic guitar moments reminiscent of the title track on 'Fabulous Muscles' with Jamie Stewart awkwardly crooning on top. There are hyper-distinct synth oddities everywhere. There is unconventional percussion. There are breathy vocals and each track is layered deeply, rarely sounding sparse.

The general impression of 'Women as Lovers' in comparison to their other releases, though, is different. It seems like this album is a lot more boisterous than before. It seems also like the songs are more like songs in the conventional sense where in the past there have been extremely experimental ambient moments between. Of course, the sense of the experimental is still there throughout: from unconventional instrumentation to irregular song structures and composition to Jamie's never-normal voice. But, it's more diluted or mingled than it has been; less in the foreground and more in the background.

On the whole, the album satisfies. There isn't a great deal of deviation from other albums only slight change. The quality of material remains as do the nuances which make Xiu Xiu an extremely unique band.