Credit: Carina Jirsch - Sound is Beauty

Music Towers makes no secret of our love for The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster. The day Island Records decided to drop the best band to rattle our bones for a decade, was the day we finally submitted to the cycle of cynicism we’d been pretending to ignore for years. Since then, all we’ve had to scratch our Eighties Machbox itch are a few leaked demo tracks via MySpace, and a fistful of live shows that left us battered and bloodied and bruised on the floor of a variety of too-small London venues. But now they’re back with a new EP. Oh how we’ve waited for this…

Eighties Matchbox play music like a gang of serial killers with access to too much hair product. Opener and title track, ‘In The Garden’, is like getting a zombie lapdance, in a basement lit by a single flickering bare bulb. Guy McKnight croons over like Brighton’s anaemic Baron Samedi, narrating their own freakish re-telling of the Adam & Eve’s expulsion from paradise.

Paranoia, suspicion, and mistrust – ‘You Say You’re A Doctor But You’re Really A Mister’ sweats them like a manic-depressive denied his lithium. Powered by guitars that sound like a runaway kaboose about to break loose, the malevolent doo-wop can barely keep a lid on the spasmodic mania that’s trying to erupt.

‘Horses Can Swim’ bounces from full-on high speed starts with some wordless screaming before the rhythms kick in like an epileptic jackhammer. The EP continues to builds towards ‘Terrible Night’, which opens like the Cramps, jacked up on cheap solvent fumes and rattling about in belfries like punk rock Quasimodos.

This is fucking magnificent. It’s darker, nastier, meaner and hungrier than anything I’ve heard this year, and up there with anything else Eighties Matchbox have ever done. It’s almost an outrage that this band aren’t the venerated as some kind of council of war to a horde of dedicated acolytes. Come Join Us.

‘In The Garden’ is released on July 30 on No Death Records / Degenerate Music. The band are touring the UK right now - click here for details.