The Beautiful New Born Children. As soon as you get your mouth around the name, the band manages to forcibly insert handfuls of chokingly good ‘garage-punk’ down your throat until you’re so festively plumped, the thought of lifting a finger is the trigger for possible regurgitation. Now that I’ve made my token analogy for the day, I can direct this discussion toward an album that is almost over before it begins. In fact, the nine track album comes in at a whopping (excuse the sarcasm) 21 minutes and 57 seconds (excuse the maths).

Having been signed to ‘it’ label Domino, home to Franz Ferdinand and Britains latest victims to ‘mania’-status the Arctic Monkeys, it would seem that The Beautiful New Born Children already have a leg-up on the competition. After listening to their debut, however, it became apparent that a leg-up was hardly in due order.

Opening track Do The Do, is possibly The Hives, given Pelle and compay had the guts to casually slip lyrics from Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box into No Pun Intended. Left, Right Forward is another such song that exemplifies this style of no-nonsense, over in under two minutes, garage-punk. In fact, it comes with more shock and abruptness than a stroke, when the albums final track, Up And Down And Round And Round, actually exceeds the precedent set by The Paper Mills lengthy three minutes and 22 seconds, with six minutes and 57 seconds of blur, disorientation, distortion and feedback.

This album is not for the faint of heart, in fact, if you do suffer from any heart difficulties, I recommend for medical purposes that you refrain from exposing yourself to this bands work. However, if you have been dealt a hand of good health, do no more favour for yourself than grabbing a copy of this album. Whoever said ‘punk is dead’ obviously didn’t wait around long enough to hear it’s reincarnation in The Beautiful New Born Children.

Now to exceed my quota of analogies for the day, thus allowing my own freedom from its shackles tomorrow, I will conclude with the following statements. If ‘punk’ was classified into metallic elements (see periodic table for more information), the very polished, watered down and generally radio-friendly clones gracing your airwaves on a daily basis, would be aluminium, and The Beautiful New Born Children would be their raw predecessor, bauxite. Now that’s raw.