With the impending release of Sir Richard Bishop's new disc via Drag City, it would behoove fans to go back and see where this guitar player came from and what that evolution sounded like. The band, which began during the early '80s in Arizona, started off sounding as tied to punk as their desert brethren the Meat Puppets, JFA and the Feederz. But just as quickly as the brothers in the Meat Puppets shed their baby fat, the Sun City Girls would do the same.

Moving from relatively straight ahead song structures to incorporating noise, any racket that could be devised and music from other cultures further distanced the band from their peers. It was a relatively understandable evolution after it began. While using improv - as tied to jazz as anything else in Western culture - the Sun City Girls recorded too many records to count that involved one off tracks, ideas and appropriations.

As time wore on and the band relocated to the Northwest, it seemed as if the Bishop brothers and percussionist Charles Goucher had missed their chance to impact out music as the grunge thing came and went only impacting a hand full of groups. The lack of monetary success, though, never seemed to be a problem for the Girls. And as the group matured and continued to release a ridiculous amount of music, brother Alan decided to begin a label by which to release work from a vast array of Eastern cultures. Via Abduction Records as well as the venerable Sublime Frequencies, the brothers worked to spread a weird gospel, but one that they each also tried to imbue in their music.

Along the way to creating one of the most dense and confusing catalogs in Western music, in 2006 the Sun City Girls issued a vinyl only release entitled Piano Bar via the Ri Be Xibalba imprint. The limited run only served to empower the Girls and set them off into a final year of recording prior to the demise of Goucher.

But during this penultimate year, Piano Bar is marked by a band still thriving at its ability to uncover more musical history. The album might be many things, but a unified and focused effort it is not. With the band's ever expanding musical pleasures, some spoken word stuff crops up here - most entertaining, though, is probably "History Lesson (Part 1)." Over a left of center, fake jazz vamp, the brothers discuss everything from American Presidents to ancient history. And in this, listeners will find the hypothesis that the group worked from.

Including humor, good music and intelligence always worked for this particular crew. It doesn't always translate to some generally understandable work, but the folks that this music is made for - the band's audience, which has been more than sated by the avalanche of releases - surely appreciated the disc. It's difficult attempting to explain such a wide range of sounds crammed into such a short offering. And while Piano Bar wasn't a preconceived and plotted out disc, it does serve to lend some insight into how the band worked together as well as with a huge amount of different musical influences.