Too much Lux is never enough for some people and Finnish band The Country Dark are clearly lifetime members of the Interior Fan Club. This is Album Number Three for the five-piece from Somewhere Near The Arctic Circle (where the fuck is Kuopio anyway?) and just like the output of The Cramps, it’s laced with humour dark enough to eclipse the sun during the depths of a Scandinavian winter.

The Country Dark play rockabilly-trash rock with lashings of twang. Appearances count for something when you mine that groove and from the cover picture of a hand with a dismembered pinkie to song titles like “Useless (Like Tits On A Boar)” and “Two Dicks In One Hole” (it’s a detective story, you porn fiend) it’s evident what you’re getting.

Do you have even the slightest interest in the early Australian punk scene? Are you looking for an excuse to your drop hard-earned on a lovingly-packaged, beautifully rendered piece of long-playing vinyl? Look no further.

Melbourne’s Babeez grew out of glam rock, parties, 5/4 rhythms and the arty Carlton music scene of the mid-1970s. Their epiphany came with hearing the Ramones’ first album. They never fit the punk mould - whatever that was in a confused Australia that absorbed “the real thing” by way of tabloid TV and sea mailed magazines that arrived months after trends had been and gone overseas.

Brattish as fuck and more highly-strung than a cosmetically-enhanced girlfriend’s bra strap, “Bite Your Tongue” proves lightning strikes at least twice. This second offering from this Melbourne band is a case of “second album, just like the first”, sonically-speaking, and that’s no bad thing.

Spacejunk operates in that hard-to-pigeonhole musical space that’s vaguely described as “psychedelic punk rock”. It equates to loud, fuzzy guitars, left-field sonic touches and a barely-controlled energy. Mark E. Moon’s lerry, acid-flecked vocal is the crowning touch.

There are two reviews already here, each definitive in their own right. Beaten to the punch with little to argue about, all I can offer are some additional observations.

A quote in a pre-release interview has led many to believe that this is Iggy’s recording swansong. The neat closure of the record’s final song “Paraguay” supports the proposition…and don’t writers love that sort of shit. If “Post Pop Depression” is Iggy’s “LA Woman” - and a shambolic Jim Morrison performance with the Doors in Detroit had a big impact on Teenage Jim – then it’s a shutting of the creative loop.

This is surely the disc which will finally break Heath Cullen in Australia, and the hearts of women everywhere. Hugely talented (Cullen produced the disc, and it sounds just lush and fine and crisp), the man has a knack of gathering like-minded musicians who just happen to share his dark and mystical streak.

Comparisons abound; a friend who is a big Cullen fan spots a Hugo Race-like similarity. I doubt that’s intended; more like Cullen and Race have visited the same horse races…

It never ceases to surprise me, the myriad ways in which a classic rock outfit can develop a style and method of expression which reaches out effortlessly into our lives, to help and spark our moods.

Even so, on first listen, although I could hear great talent here, it wasn’t getting to me. Until I reached what I suppose is Side Two, where things take a sudden left turn and … when the first side rolled again to play, the entire band made far, far more sense. And it’s been on repeat in the car to my great joy and the bane of the local cats and one rather irritated daddy possum.