Possibly more of a Manchester sushi-group than super-group, as the squashy rice base is made up of ex-members of soundscape shatterers Sonar Yen and a guy called Gareth, once of electro-evolutionists TVH-3, is the still very much alive, flapping and gasping fish the dermatologically deviant chef is trying to place atop the dilapidated dollops of food with the delicacy of a deranged rhino.

While I am yet to curtail my cynicism about how, of a sudden, members of the Yen have gone from their earlier Mogwai / Sonic Youth maelstrom to what, on the surface, shines up as another slice of stale bread from the loaf of punk-funk archly angular discordance, this single could possibly point a way out of the current trough as their heroes Joy Division did in the era of post-punk.

Stammering and stuttering through early Psychedelic Furs and ‘New Picnic Time’ era Pere Ubu, bamboozled by cryptic crossword clues from The Birthday Party, strangulated vocals rub up against confused cardiac arrest guitars creating a simplistically strange and voyeuristically vindictive Chic with a mangled beat and a murky moronic-ness so magnificent the Banshees would wail and seek shelter with a withered wallflower.

Sure, the ugly papier mache head of Mark E Smith and The Fall rears up throughout -not least in the songs’ rambling, garbled, lyrically delinquent death diction diatribes – but such similarities are discarded with an indifferent glee that comes more through invention than idiocy.

For the righteously ridiculous ‘Heidkinger In The Telephone’, which may myopically see the good Captain – Beefheart - guesting for Phil Oakey in The Human League before being ousted at the jousting by a throttle throated, paint-stripping vicars son attending a Swell Maps tea party, Stranger Son dare you onto the dancefloor. One defiled already by the likes of Radio 4 and Interpol SSoWB darken it still further and so manage to construct a tilting scaffold network which occupies a space in the shade all on its own.

At least for the time being, there doesn’t seem much chance of feeling claustrophobia from the competition for this cantankerously clanging collage of rusty scrap metal, anaesthetic free amputations, arrhythmia and an arkestra of washing machines full of cutlery and kittens on full spin as sadistic succour to a patient in the midst of a panic attack induced by P.I.L.’s ‘Metal Box’.

Wired, welcomingly weird, wrecked and havoc wreaking wipe-outs - offbeat, off-hand and quite possibly obligatory.

Not bad. __________________________________________________

- Stu Gibson