Darkness becomes Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart. One of the San Francisco-based warbler's most maniacal, sadomasochist moments came on a track called "Ian Curtis Wishlist". Gender-bending suits him, too-- see the same album's "Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl" or last year's The Air Force's "Hello From Au Claire", the latter sung by longtime Xiu Xiu multi-instrumentalist Caralee McElroy. For a singer who at his best can seem like a kind of gothic Morrissey, with tremulous vocals akin to those of Antony Hegarty, a new album entitled Women as Lovers (after a 1994 novel by Nobel Prize-winning Austrian feminist writer Elfriede Jelinek) looks to be a tantalizing opportunity for both.

Jelinek's work has been dismissed by some as pornography, and Xiu Xiu's music also openly expresses emotions and situations that are typically tidied up or repressed. Women as Lovers opener "I Do What I Want When I Want" suggests Xiu Xiu's musical experimentation is not yet done, as distorted do-do-dos, whistles, feedback, skronky sax, and what sounds like harmonium spar with pick-heavy guitar downstrokes and Stewart's fluttering whispers. The setting begins with "a dream about loss", and no amount of fancy verbiage or off-kilter instrumentation can mask the sense made explicit in Jelinek's novel: that, man or woman, nightmare or daydream, loss and love both hurt. You might be surprised to hear D.H. Lawrence novel Women in Love isn't all sugar and spice, either.