Here and now, with that galloping, bigmuff stew slapped about the ear-holes, with the head afire with the rockabilly rompin' and the dropped-D sing-a-longs and with Ben Brisini howling and barking and raging like a rabid dog left and right, I'm thinking; "This is just the tonic I needed."

Silly bastard - such was the part performed by me and my fine self for to have been so apprehensive with regards that first jab of a forefinger off of the play button.

Discordant chaos? Impenetrable sheets of terrifying, hysterical, rotten dot com barbarity? Fuck the bit of it.

The Underwater Fascists is, it transpires, an absolute joy of a record. It's amongst the most distinctive, memorable records I've encountered this year, and seeing as how this year has also offered the likes of Cassadaga and Icky Thump and Easy Tiger and Volta and Favourite Worst Nightmare and If The Ocean Gets Rough and those Traveling Wilburys reissues, that's a hell of a feat accomplished right there.

Sonically, Touchers lurch and loll and loiter in and around a muck-crusted pasture I'm gonna go ahead and name Scuzz-Folk, or Dirty-Bastard-Country-Grunge, if you'd prefer.

The sounds they create are of a sort you'd expect to find not underwater, but coiled about the trunk of some ancient, weather-wrecked cypress tree, a gargantuan article situated top a hillside overlooking a fifteen-mile industrial sprawl. From the branches; great glooping splods of factory-reek-hued sap bubble and pop, the rust-coloured leaves pawed and ruffled by a brooding, ash-grey breeze.

The Underwater Fascist is the kinda record Johnny Cash might've ended up making if that "Rusty Cage" cover had been his idea. Kinda record Neil Young And Crazy Horse would've maybe crafted had they hung about with Eddie Vedder a couple albums longer.

Kinda record Uncle Tupelo may have gotten around to eventually, had they gone on long enough to get lazy and need to "re-discover ourselves" - i.e., get some new haircuts and some louder guitars and some ballads shorn of string arrangements and lyrics about "fuck".

It's a record lurches violently atween aching, ragged, tender beauty and head-down, arse-in-the-air, riff-sick abandon. It's as in love with the notion of a lilting, melancholy lullaby as it is with the idea of driving half your face into your kidneys with a power-chord the size of fifteen whale-bellies.

At times it sounds like someone's taken a soldering iron to Surfer Rosa by The Pixies and the first Two Gallants album, joining the buggers at the bifkins and sending them racing out into the evening with a bagful of sticks and ECT-fried academics and hooks you could cripple a hovercraft with. Other times it's a bit like a less lo-fi Moldy Peaches, with lyrics about "I think you are beautiful, but you are for the worms" and "my brain is out to get me" instead of "Who'm I s'posed to stick my dick in?" or "I'm downloading porn with Dave".