Good old Kory Clarke. For someone as apparently lawless and dissolute as the he, our hero is remarkably reliable when it comes to doling out high quality, sleazy alterna-metal thrills. Armed with a voice that makes Spike from the Quireboys sound like Placido Domingo, Clarke is back in 2019 with another arsenal of slow-slung, fucked-up good time tuneage and, if this album doesn’t quite pack the spiteful punch of 2017’s Back on The Lash, there’s still more than enough to get your teeth into if Leopardskin jackets and crates of Special Brew are your thing.

The title track is a stormer, Clarke screaming himself to a standstill at track’s end, whilst the greasy biker rock of Off My Face sounds like The Almighty in a dimension where Ricky Warwick actually walks it like he talks it. Which is an exciting dimension to be in, let me tell you. “I’M OFF MY FACE AND IT FEELS GOOD’ rasps our protagonist with the sort of glassy-eyed conviction only the truly possessed, erm, possess…

And really, these two tracks are the rest of the album in microcosm. Warrior Soul in 2019 isn’t a place where you’ll find much new ground being broken or many envelopes being stretched. But then the primal, rock n’roll values being espoused on just about every track aren’t particularly complementary to trailblazing experimentation or new-man navel glazing. Melt Down does carry a little of the social commentary that Clarke has become famous for down the years, but at this point it’s delivered more like the four-in-the-afternoon musings of a man who’s been on the cooking lager since opening time rather than the rabble rousing, eat-the-rich-and-storm-the-barricades torch songery of yore. And if it’s reasonably certain that Clarke will never come up with a song that possesses the shattered beauty of The Losers ever again, you can be equally sure that you’ll never be less than absolutely entertained by anything the man releases. Tracks like the penultimate one, here – Going Mental, in fact. Now there’s a manifesto I can get behind!

Get infected with some of Kory’s disease now!

Rock ‘n’ Roll Disease is out now.