Having Long ago established themselves as the most compelling fixture of Newcastle’s underground circuit, Shin Jin Rui finally drop ‘Zutiqua’. It’s a move that ought to bring us all one step closer to curing the headcold British garage rawk has been groaning and spluttering through in recent years.

Proof that digging deep will always reward you with a chunk of gold for your shit-covered hands, ‘Zutiqua’ is a rusting, steam-powered automaton of an album, Franken-built with the exhumed parts of every slacker that ever mattered- Malkmus, Westerberg, Richman…They’re all to be found in the thick of Rui’s sweet rawk soup.

In the Pavement style meander of ‘Hollywood Listen!’ and the Lou Reed meets Bunnymen cult classic in waiting ‘Use Your Youth’, to the Replacements and Minutemen nods to be found in ‘Pre Slaughter Trial’ and ‘Foreign Cars’ they join the dots between the best of lo-fi’s now crusty heroes, and offer each a shot in the arm.

Other times the Rui sound like nothing else, like when ‘Eternity Is Loaded’ sees it’s spooked arpeggios suddenly crushed to death by a single, towering, monolithic riff. One with such primitive ferocity it sounds as though it were imported direct from a Cro-Magnon age of rocking out to the smack of bone against skull.

Full of saltily poetic tales of confusion and alienation, this is the sound of quarter-life inertia made good. The Dissillusionment of those too ‘backwards’ or bored to keep up with an ever-more acrobatic world of band-wagon hopping, harnessed, and waved like a home-made zip gun at the misery society wants you feeling the minute the first wrinkle appears.

Instead, Shin Jin Rui offer a hypodermic injection of virulent eccentricity to immunise you against today’s ever-more maddening world. A cure for garage rock’s epidemic of retro-posturing and terminal chic-ification.

Listen to Zutiqua and you hear a tomahawk splat the eyeball of every glib sycophant pandering to this bullshit industry of insular, fretting cool. The first stone is cast, you’re only worry now is whether or not this record is heard enough. I hereby allow you to guiltlessly bathe your arse in this sweet rawk plentitude. Enjoy