Brit classic rock troupe The Quireboys have been enjoying a bit of a creative resurgence of late, releasing albums at a rate they’d have chortled at back in their ‘salad days’ in the late eighties/early nineties.

But happily this new-found Stakhanovite efficiency hasn’t meant a drop off in quality as Twisted Love features easily some of the best material the band has committed to wax in its long, sometimes hapless career. Permit me to tell you about some of them…

Closing song Midnight Collective, for instance is a sleazy, almost sinister Stonesy strut that tells you all you need to know about the viability of The Quireboys as a songwriting entity in 2016; the track simply oozes class, with vocalist Spike running the show with his hoarse, ‘something of the night’ narrative style whilst the rest of the the band construct a slithering, sexy edifice to seventies funk-informed rock in the background. It’s magnificent stuff, and conjures mischievous thoughts of what a Rod Stewart-fronted Rolling Stones might have sounded like had such a momentous event come to pass forty years ago…

Life’s a Bitch rocks like a particularly unreconstructed bastard as Spike airs a list of grievances to a former love gone sour (I went on tour just to pay your bills…), and the sassy, four-to-the-floor Stroll On evokes memories of growing up on Canal Street in New York in the seventies with it’s R N’B thud. Which is strange, because I never spent any time in Canal Street at all in the seventies. The power of music, eh?

Elsewhere Shotgun Way is mightily impressive, whilst the title track should be lighting up radios everywhere if there’s any justice, and whilst Spike sometimes gets a bit overwhelmed by the roaring guitars of Paul Guerin and Guy Griffin – on the honking, Aerosmithy opening track in particular he sounds like he’s struggling to hold his own against the blues storm being whipped up around him – that’s a small price to pay to be able to hear the man reciting his sweet street poetry once again. Wonderful stuff.