Gang of Four's fifth album marks an exhilarating return to the jagged grooves and incisive lyrics of their first two — 1979's Entertainment! and the following year's Solid Gold. Those initial albums were ferocious but funky benchmarks; critically lauded as the height of political/sonic extremism, they found new life in the last decade as source material for countless "post-punk" revivalists.

Content, then, is on one level an act of repossession, but it delivers on plenty of other thrills, too. For gnarly guitarist Andy Gill, it's a matter of getting stuck in some ultra-rhythmic, super-corrosive, amp-at-11-and-a-half riffing at which, after many years stuck behind the producer's desk, he remains terrifyingly masterful. He leads an all-new rhythm section with a sturdy swing, to which it would surely be nigh-on impossible not to surrender on the dancefloor.

King, meanwhile, strikes a unique voice: far too esoteric to be party-political, yet always acerbic, questioning, thought-provoking. As before, his microscope zeroes in on the motivations and dislocations in human relationships every bit as much as on Western culture's deepening consumerist crisis. "You Don't Have To Be Mad" needles at male paranoia in casual sex, while "She Said ‘You Made A Thing Of Me'" spotlights how a man's… read more »