Speed and spontaneity appear to have been the order of the day. Many of these songs are crude, jerry-built and loud. The lyrics – toilet wall slang, dirty jokes, weirdly affecting telegrams from the rubber room – are tossed off rather than laboured over. ‘Depth Charge Ethel’, ‘Love Bomb’ and ‘Get It On’ won’t be bothering the Ivor Novello jury anytime soon, but they are gratifyingly roughage-heavy. In an era when all the young dudes sound milquetoast and menopausal, it’s a thrill to hear a bunch of 40-somethings reverse the evolutionary cycle and make a record that sounds both deviant and aberrant. You can hear bits of drummer Jim Sclavunos’s former employers The Cramps, plus a dash of Led Zeppelin and sometime Bad Seed James Johnston’s Gallon Drunk, but there’s also an eerie all-pervading atmosphere of unrequited lust, loss and lonesomeness on tunes like ‘(I Don’t Need You To) Set Me Free’ and ‘Man In The Moon’.

So while this dirty weekend of a record may present itself as a man-smelly beast mugging for the mics, there’s more to it than smart musicians playing dumb. ‘Grinderman’ is certainly a backward hark to Birthday Party dissonance (Nick Launay’s masterclass production makes everything sound fuzzy and overdriven, even the piano) but it also reverses old blues braggadocio tropes on ‘No Pussy Blues’, Nick dispensing with medallion-chested luvverman moves and assuming the mantle of a middle aged rock star who can’t get his jollies.

Above all, it’s a thrill to hear a bunch of ferocious players let off the leash. ‘Electric Alice’ and ‘When My Love Comes Down’ are thick swathes of swampy funk in which Warren Ellis distinguishes himself with loops, overdubs and passages of total noise, while Martyn P. Casey and Sclavunos get to flex rhythmical on a succession of slow, loping, limbre grooves.

This, one suspects, is how they used to make records in the old days.

Fast and loose.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.