You can tell from this record's very first chords that The Waxing Captors understand being in a band. That they've got it. Sounding like Richard Hell fronting early Adam and the Ants, they're a breathtaking, lunatic shambles of a band: a scratching screaming howling beautiful mess.

Supporting evidence? (1) The scratchy, trebley guitar scree, which makes for a sound so inherently chaotic and permanently frayed at the edges that questions of musical competency become utterly, utterly irrelevant (as well as hinting at satisfying levels of entropy, this abrasive noise also lends itself well to such pleasing sounds as grating white-noise squeals, raging howls of feedback, and riffs which blur into each other under a cloak of high pitched distortion...); (2) the keyboards which wouldn't sound out of place on a gameshow sound track but which here are somewhat incongruous; (3) the vocal line which seems to be a distillation of all the least conventional and most exhibitionist punk frontmen; and (4) the gloriously random use of maracas... and you have a satisfying and wilfully perverse take on punk rock musicianship.

Which is fine, because from the evidence here the Captors thrive on the wilfully perverse. The notion of conventional song structure is clearly anathema to them: instead they delight in exhilaratingly grinding switches of musical gear masquerading as a leap from verse to chorus. And so high speed tumbles of guitars suddenly make way for a low-pitched "Ahhhh-ahhhh-ahhhh-ahhh", and the desperate distortion of the verse is abruptly shoved aside by a (stupidly clear in comparison) wheee-ooooh-wheeee-oooh-wheee-oooh of keyboards. And then a voice says "Someone, please, confiscate their guitars" and it all trails off...

And so the defence rests its case: the band are proven, beyond a shadow of doubt, worthy. The Waxing Captors are thrilling, chaotic, emotive, random and utterly unpredictable, and they therefore capture to perfection every aural aspect of the rock'n'roll myth. If you haven't heard them yet you are an impoverished human being, and I pity you.