The SCG reissue campaign continues apace with this little collection of hard-to-find singles and unreleased rarities. Ask ten people in the know about the Girls and you're liable to get ten very different opinions, buoyed by the fact that no two releases by the now disbanded trio follow the same modus operandi. This collection consists almost entirely of spoken word pieces with musical accompaniment, for some an acquired taste (to put it tactfully). There is often the air of an elaborate and rather snide joke being played on the listener, which gets on some people's nerves.

"The Rhinemaiden's Palatial Mountain Retreat" opens the proceedings sounding like a slightly more demented Frank Zappa snippet, with a flubbed spoken intro and massed voices in sloppy unison. "Sleazy Nashville" sounds just like the title suggests, a drunken stream-of-consciousness waltz, and "Eyeball In A Quart Jar Of Snot" is a quintessential bit of Gocher creepiness. I can't decide whether the title track is in fact what it purports to be, or a nose-thumbing forgery. Supposedly a confrontation between a street person and a shopkeeper, it has just enough self-aware patina to make me believe that it's the latter.

My own preference in SCG listening are their electric trio offerings like "Valentines From Matahari" and "Live From Planet Boomerang", so I'll keep this one but probably not listen to it a lot.