Luke Haines - 'Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop' (Degenerate) Released 30/10/06

Luke Haines refreshes the parts other songwriters can’t reach. Hate, fear and paranoia are his stock-in-trade, and with an undiminished ear for an insidious pop melody he unleashes this focused, 10-song antidote to the slew of banal, talentless no-marks currently clogging up the airwaves.

Last year’s 3-CD retrospective, ‘Luke Haines Is Dead’, felt like a vindication, a necessary reminder of the man’s consistently probing talent. Like a Jarvis Cocker reared by wolves wearing Elvis Costello’s vomit-spattered, Oxfam-donated hand-me-downs, Haines has spent years scabrously mapping England’s squalid underbelly. But while The Auteurs achieved limited critical acclaim and Black Box Recorder moderate chart success, in none of his guises did he receive his proper due.  Well, he’s back, and this time it’s personal.

Not that he hankers for a Mojo cover, as the thrillingly snide ‘The Heritage Rock Revolution’ makes clear. Over an insanely catchy glam-rock stomp, he rails against rock’n’roll nostalgia, gleefully biting the hand that feeds as he snipes at both past-it stars and their sycophantic followers (‘He’s a bona fide legend, a credit to his rest home, who let him out?’). Meanwhile ‘The Walton Hop’ conjures a seedy vision of adolescence before iPods and mobiles ruled the earth, and must be one of the few songs to reference disgraced pop nonce Jonathan King.

Elsewhere Haines paints a 1970s of concrete, wet Saturdays and the Yorkshire Ripper on ‘Leeds United’, which packs countless melodic twists into little over three and a half grimly poetic minutes. Musically the album ransacks a variety of styles with White Album-like abandon, and in this respect matches the little-mined territory of the lyrics. ‘Freddie Mills Is Dead’ deploys a suitably funereal tolling bell, its queasy fairground organ evoking Ennio Morricone by way of Blackpool. But  ‘Fighting In The City Tonight’ is possibly the most startling. With its pop-sheen opening complete with slide-guitar hook you wonder whether Haines has lifted a lost single by Natalie Imbruglia.  But then he sings ‘Kick me out the alehouse, put me in a taxi’ and normal service is resumed.