This collection is really the soundtrack to a new stage show loosley based on the Church's seven deadly sins (before they started adding new ones). Unsurprisingly, It's jam packed with the usual childish scatalogical humour, musings on death, sex and rancid cocks. It's not going to be to everyone's taste, but it's not as pointless as it occasionally sounds.

The adolescent knockabout lyrics can get tiresome quite quickly, but that isn't all there is to it. For a start, musically the Tiger Lillies are quite magnificent. Even after so many albums they stick quite rigidly to the Wiemar era blueprint. The accordion, double bass, brushed snares and lilting piano tinkling away are arranged beautifully. It's quite easy to ignore most of the words and just enjoy Martin Jaques' falsetto and the emotional punch of the tunes. And there are certain points where the balance between humour and pathos is done well. 'Down To Hell' is a wonderfully mournful ballad where the 'junky searches for a vein, a drunk vomits down the drain, the wife beater beats his wife into shape, the paedophile a child does rape'. Just looking at the words in print doesn't do justice to the way it actually works in song. And as usual, the lyrics often follow that old fashioned, awkward rhyming structure like German cabaret in translation. And I always assume that's deliberate.

How honest all this is is up for debate. Part of me thinks that it's just the kind of smart arse tomfoolery that public schoolboys get up to at the Edinburgh festival, but there's a bleak purity in the best songs which suggests Jaques understands what he's singing about. He's returned to the themes of addiction, isolation and misanthropy so many times that the other stand out song 'Life is Mean' is the kind of brutalism they did so well on 'Tiger Lily Line.' This stuff wouldn't work as well without the sarcastic humour, it's just a question of whether they take it too far. At times I'd say they do, but this is a long term project which is creating enough really worthwhile songs that I'll forgive them (and they'd probably say I'm completely missing the point, anyway ).

There's an admirable bravery in this kind of digging around in the sewers, and a strange kind of life affirming warmth too. It's unlikely that anyone is going to accuse them of taking themselves too seriously. The show itself has had mixed reviews but overall the album works on it's own terms.

Stuart Blackwood is 30 (odd), was born in Newarthill and lives in Glasgow. He supports Motherwell FC, has an MA in Economics and Philosophy and likes William Bell (the singer), Bukowski & Fante, Eric Arthur Blair, Negativeland, Eric Hobsbawm, politics, philosophy and ambiguity. He dislikes Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama, U2, categorization and Violence.