I’ve played this CD several times since I received it, and the reason it gets only three bottles is that while it’s really good, it just doesn’t seem to get up and grab me. Maybe that’s me, maybe that’s the production, or the recording on the day. Call me a bastard, feel free, but to me the pace seems just a little too slow, lacking in attack… or something. I can’t quite nail it.

It seems that the imperative a band like this should have has not come out. This happens far too often with recordings (several favourite Adelaide bands who I absolutely loved have released CDs and LPs which seem sheepish rather than roar like a bull buffalo in Kakadu; the worst part is, when a band know the record isn’t up to snuff, they know it and feel bad. The next step should be to determine to do better next time).

Listen up, punks and noiseniks: The Canadian band’s fifth album in 17 years is inarguably their best. It rocks like fuck; It scratches like a rabid kitten. It’s tuneful and noisily offensive at the same time. All of which should tell you something about The Ex-Boyfriends even if you’ve never heard of them.

The Ex-Boyfriends come from Calgary and I’m willing to bet they’re the best-in-breed in that neck of the woods. If Calgary’s music scene is half as fractured as anywhere else, it takes a lot of balls to be a rock and roll band. Big ones if you play noisy punk rock. Shamefully, I’d forgotten they were around until a notice about this heavy-diuty chunk of vinyl landed in the post box.

Well, this is awkward. David Bowie produces a new album. It's actually pretty good. Easily the best album he's produced since "Low". I know, right? A lot of people hate that one too but an album made by a coke snorting lunatic whilst driving around a car park at seventy five miles an hour is by definition going to sort the likes from the dislikes.

After the Seventies glory years of Glam and guitar solos, things took a turn to the weird. The so called Berlin trilogy featured two good albums "Low" and "Heroes" and the rather jumbled "Lodger". His production of Iggy Pop's "The Idiot" quietly changed the way we'd look at popular music. Joy Division and Public Image Limited were obviously paying attention as well as a veritable army of prissy nerds with their sister's make-up kits and Casio keyboards.

Good god, what a fucking racket.

“Johnny Streetlight” is four-and-a-half bottles of joyous, fresh-faced old school rock’n’roll, soaked in piss and substance abuse and if you treat it right you’ll lose part of your hearing (just don’t eat the worm at the bottom). There’s no bad songs on “Johnny Streetlight”, they’re all good for gold. If this band had been around in the mid-‘80s they woulda been huge.

The inner sleeve pic by Leif Alan Creed makes the band look positively criminal (one gentle soul makes up for his lack of pupils by wielding a rather lethal saw).

This re-issue of a 1994 album by Medway’s finest sounds as brattish and vital as anything else around now, the perfect blend of punk rock and beat pop. Fashions come and go but Billy Childish remains a constant.

You think you work hard? By the time Thee Headcoats released this they had eight albums under their belts and fuck knows how many singles. Formed after Thee Mighty Caesars ground to a halt, they were an influence on everyone from Jack White to the Black Lips, Thee Oh-Sees and Jon Spencer.

In a world of shoddy, sub-par live releases and infinite re-issues of studio out-takes, this one lives up to the hype. Capturing the Heartbreakers briefly back on home turf after their first stint in the UK and in all their drug-infested glory, “LAMF Live” is the album your mother warned you about and your old man wanted banned.

Where’s the danger in rock and roll? You hear people asking all the time. It’s around if you dig deep enough but it was never so nakedly on display as back in the late ‘70s when the Heartbreakers were in full swing.